Flowers insolita Blog

We are pleased to announce that Lori (our lead designer) won a design competition recently organized by “Flower Chat”, an online community of floral professionals.

In this competion, participants were asked to present a creative way of arranging one dozen roses.  Based on the community votes, twelve winners were chosen, and Lori’s design was one of the winners (they didn’t rank the 12 winners).

The idea of this competition is to showcase we professional florists’ ability to design a one-dozen rose arrangement that differs from the traditional design (the one in a Spring vase with Baby’s Breath).

Lori’s piece, shown below, cosists of one dozen roses and bamboo poles as main components.  It received high marks from many distinguished designers in Flower Chat.

You can read their comments by visiting the actual gallery (simply click on the picture below).  Our alias in Flower Chat community is “goldfish.”

We also encourage you to take a look at the other 11 winners’ masterpieces!  Some of them are very creative or even a little bit weird… :)

P.S. The competition got very intense.  In fact an accusation was made about a conspiracy and unethical solicition of votes.  A florist accused of being a cheater vigorously defended his action.

Read their fascinating exchanges here (1, 2, 3, 4).  LOL

Whew!  We are just glad that the dispute didn’t go as far as endless re-counting and lawsuits!  :)

From SAF (Society of American Florists) news:

The number of retail florist establishments continued to contract in 2006 according to just-released data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns.

The number of retail florist establishments declined 4.3 percent in 2006 to 20,227, down from 21,135 in 2005. As shown in the figure, the survey has documented a decline in the number of florists each year since 1996. From 1996 to 2006, the number of florists fell 24.3 percent.

It’s a sad news. The pie is shrinking and some of the weaker florists are being pushed out. It’s a difficult time for all of us.

It’s not that flower industry as a whole is in decline. In fact it has been more or less flat in the last several years. It is that people are no longer buying flowers from retail florists.

Increasing number of consumers now buy flowers at supermarkets, discounters (Costco, etc), and on the Internet. This is part of a general trend in which mass marketers are killing small mom&pop shops. Independent bookstores, for example, are having a very difficult time.

To not only survive but also grow, we believe that we need to achieve two goals.

The first is to be distinctive. Our products and services should not be like anyone else’s. Our customers should receive an experience that they cannot get in mass marketers.

The second is to be price-competitive. We know it goes against a conventional wisdom that small retailers can’t compete with big guys on price. We actually disagree. While it is not easy to do, but there are many ways for us to be price competitive.

Do you know that we don’t have any “minimum order” requirement? If you want us to deliver a single rose wrapped, we will do. Normal delivery charges will apply.

There are two exceptions: Floral tributes for funerals and orders during busy holidays (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day, Christmas).

We are closed on July 4th, 5th (Sat), and 6th (Sun).  However, if you want us to deliver on one of these days, we may be able to do so.  Please call us on or before July 3rd.  Thank you and have a great Independence Day!

There’s an interesting article in Boston Globe entitled “Picking just the right florist.”

The author, Kytja Weir, tested two national brands, FTD.com and 1-800-flowers.com, as well as two local florists in Boston, Winston Flowers and University Florist.  I know Winston; they are a very famous florist over there.  Her budget was $75 including everything (tax and delivery).

She gave a good mark to one of the local florists, University Florist.  Kudos for them!

She didn’t like Winston, because the flowers didn’t last long and the arrangement size was too small.  Winston is “too famous” for small orders like a $75 bouquet.  My best guess for what happned is that their designers probably didn’t care.  Artists’ arrogance.  A common problem of a “famous” florist is that they are used to be doing a lot of artistic event work, in which the longivity of flowers doesn’t matter.

She didn’t like 1-800-flowers, because the flowers were essentially a whole bunch of cheap flowers, many of which didn’t last.  She got unlucky; this florist who delivered 1-800 order seems to be a particularly bad one.  But, here’s the fundamental problem of using 1-800-flowers: you have no control over which florist will make your arrangement.

She didn’t like FTD, either, not because of the flowers but because they forgot to include a message card.  Nah.  People do make mistakes, and this florist was decent enough to send an apology plant.  Not many do this.  I would give a high mark to this florist (Exotic Flowers).  But again, FTD doesn’t deserve the credit.  This local florist does.

In another post, I talked about a nursery guy who was claiming that it’s been difficult to find a “decent young people” willing to work in his establishment. I also wrote that I hear the same stories from many small business owners.

Well, one of our employees, who happens to be a young Long Island person, just disappeared. I say “disappear” because she didn’t tell us she was quiting. She just didn’t show up one day, and that was it. That day, she left a message in our answering machine, saying she had “forgotten” that she had to go to school that day, so she couldn’t come to work. Sounds stupid, we thought but we didn’t know she actually had quit. Interestingly, her mom showed up instead, to pick up her pay-check.

On her next workday (Friday), she didn’t show up again. At that point, we realized that she actually had quit and her message on Monday was a complete lie.

We are clueless as to why she quit. Regardless, there’s nothing wrong for anyone to quit the job. But, I would have expected her to tell us that s/he is quiting, preferably two weeks in advance. Not showing up one day, making up a story, and sending her mom to pick up the paycheck… that isn’t something I would have expected a grownup to do.

The bigger question, though, is how come her mom is allowing this behavior. Does she know that her daughter just lied to us? Or was she also being misled by her daughter. Maybe she told her mom a completely different story, along the line of her being a victim of a terrible work place or something.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We know the truth. In the meantime, we now have an opening for a sales rep position. Hopefully we can find someone responsible this time.

We are located in Long Island, the Island of Lindsay Lohan and spoiled brats.

I was talking to the owner of a nursery the other day.  He was complaining how difficult it is to find “decent young people” to work in his establishment.  I often hear the same story from many small retail-business owners here; young people in Long Island do not want to work in their stores. 

Come to think of it, in the last three years, we have hired about two dozen young local people (all of them are female); only two lasted more than three months.  One lasted only 3 hours, which is the current record of the shortest tenure of our past employees.

Take a look at any fast-food restaurants in Long Island.  Do we see any young Long Islanders working there?  I don’t think so.  Flipping burgers is not a kind of job that princes and princesses in Long Island would take.  Too much of a work for too little pay, just like a job in a flower shop or nursery for that matter.

I often go to a local supermarket (STOP & SHOP) to buy fresh fruits used for fruit baskets.  There are a couple of young people “working” there.  By “working”, I mean a) chatting with friends and b) text-messaging, while paying absolutely no attention to customers.

The other day, I was in the self-service checkout.  One of my items didn’t go through.  I dared to press “Help” button, which I shouldn’t have.  After several minutes, a young lady reluctantly showed up.  I explained the situation to her.  Annoyed by this unexpected extra work, she sighed to my face.  If one of our sales associates ever sighed to our customer asking for help, I guarantee you that she would be fired on the spot. I’m usually pretty quiet, not complaing about anything.  But I wasn’t having a good day on that particular day, so I told her, “But you are paid, right?”  To which she replied “You’re mean!”  The Princess spoke and I humbly accepted my defeat.

I sighed… I wonder if the manager of STOP & SHOP knows this.  Whoever the manager is, my guess is that s/he probably knows about it, but can’t do anything about it.  That’s because, if s/he complains, these kids would simply quit, creating a vacancy that s/he would have to fill again with, what, the same kind of kids.  There’s no realistic chance that the next one would be better.  Worse yet, their parents might sue the shop or manager for whatever reasons they come up with.  Not worth the fight. 

Recently, we have had a few incidents in which a prospective bride came into our store with a specific floral proposal that we believe had been articulated by some other florist.  She apparently was looking for a “cheaper” florist who could duplicate someone else’s idea at a discount.

We are sorry, but we don’t do that here.  We didn’t know who the other florist was, but we know that they must have spent time and money to provide that proposal.  Even though we are technically competitors, it is against our business ethics to steal someone else’s idea and make money out of it.

There is nothing wrong for a prospective bride to do price shopping.  In fact she should interview multiple florists, as each florist has a different design style and philosophy.  She should pick one whom she feels most comfortable with.

It’s just that a floral proposal is the real work done by a floral designer, even though it might be free.  As a fellow florist, we just can’t profit from the work done by someone else.

According to an article that appeared in British tabloid “The Sun” yesterday, a romantic proposal plan by a British guy vanished into thin air, after a balloon containing an expensive diamond ring was blown away.

The guy, Lefkos Hajji, asked his florist to put his $12,000 engagement-ring inside a balloon. His plan was to give her girlfriend a pin to “pop” the ring out. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. After he left the florist shop, a gust pulled his balloon from his hand…

Lefkos said: “I couldn’t believe it… I just watched as it went further and further into the air. I felt like such a plonker. It cost a fortune and I knew my girlfriend would kill me.”

According to him, his girlfriend isn’t talking to him ever since.

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I was wondering, though, what if this happened to us, or any florist in America for that matter? I think there’s a good chance that we would end up in a court. Are we supposed to refuse a potentially risky request from a customer?  What if he insists?  Do we have to ask the customer to sign a paper saying that we aren’t responsible for the consequence?  Food for thoughts…

According to BBC News, an Iranian court ordered a guy to give his wife the 124,000 roses that he promised in her dowry.

(Excerpt from the BBC site)

The woman said she was claiming the dowry because her “very stingy husband” would not even pay for a cup of coffee, according to the E’temad newspaper.

The court has seized the man’s flat until he produces all of the roses.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry, or mahr, at any time during a marriage or when getting divorced. [snip]

According to E’temad, the woman, identified as Hengameh, decided to claim her entire dowry of 124,000 red roses after 10 years of marriage to “punish her very stingy husband”.

“Shortly after marriage, I realised that Shahin was very cheap,” she told the newspaper. “He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant.”

Shahin told the court he could only afford to give her five roses a day and complained that it was his wife’s “billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head”.

But the judge rejected Shahin’s pleas and ordered his $64,000 (£33,000) flat to be confiscated until he has bought them all.

A long-stemmed rose costs about $2 (£1.09) in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins or property as mahr. An Iranian man can end up in jail for dowry debts.

124,000 roses!!! With the pace of 5 roses a day (~1,825 roses a year), it takes about 68 years to pay off this debt. Good luck Mr Shahin!