We'd appreciate any customer feed back from the Valentine's holiday. Usually, we call back selected recipients approximately a week after they've received flowers, but this year we decided to start calling recipients on the holiday. We thought this would be a better way to catch any mistakes that we might have made and leave us time to correct it before the day was over. Fortunately, we only had one mistake - we missed one mylar balloon and we fixed it immediately. All of the recipients we spoke to were thrilled with their flowers and somewhat surprised to be getting a call.
Since we had already contacted the recipients once, we didn't do our regular calls a week later. We have spoken with several regular customers who've ordered flowers since the holiday and they were pleased with the vase life of their roses and the ones we gave as gifts to loved ones lasted over a week, so we're fairly sure our customers should have been pleased. But, just in case you received flowers that didn't last at least a week, please let us know.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Shopping Smart for Valentine's Day
Many people order flowers once a year, on Valentine's Day so it's reasonable to expect that many reading this may be searching the net for the lowerst price. Be careful. So many people are under the impression that this is a huge profit holiday for florist and it isn't quite that simple.
Imagine doing 2-3 weeks worth of work in 2-3 days. Growers must produce several times their regular crop, wholesalers must process and treat extra shipments, and retailers have somewhere around 5 to 6 times the usual number of orders. So while our prices are higher to cover extra costs, most profit is really made on volume.
If you are ordering flowers online, be sure you are ordering from a neighborhood florist. There is information all over the internet about order gatherers, direct-from-the-farm shipping, etc., but the simple fact is that if you want flowers delivered arranged in a container they will come from a local florist, so ordering them from anyone else just adds to the cost. You might see websites offering much lower prices, but they send those orders to local florists. One thing you can be sure, we will give our customers the lowest price and the highest priority, so those orders we get from online companies that are under value are usually rejected. It is not unusual for us to get an order, reject it, get it again the next day and reject it again. Once we even got the same order again, 3 days after Valentine's Day (at a higher price than originally), because no local florist would fill it.
For better or worse, flowers are expensive at Valentine's Day - just like diamonds and you know what they say about diamonds that cost a dime ....
Imagine doing 2-3 weeks worth of work in 2-3 days. Growers must produce several times their regular crop, wholesalers must process and treat extra shipments, and retailers have somewhere around 5 to 6 times the usual number of orders. So while our prices are higher to cover extra costs, most profit is really made on volume.
If you are ordering flowers online, be sure you are ordering from a neighborhood florist. There is information all over the internet about order gatherers, direct-from-the-farm shipping, etc., but the simple fact is that if you want flowers delivered arranged in a container they will come from a local florist, so ordering them from anyone else just adds to the cost. You might see websites offering much lower prices, but they send those orders to local florists. One thing you can be sure, we will give our customers the lowest price and the highest priority, so those orders we get from online companies that are under value are usually rejected. It is not unusual for us to get an order, reject it, get it again the next day and reject it again. Once we even got the same order again, 3 days after Valentine's Day (at a higher price than originally), because no local florist would fill it.
For better or worse, flowers are expensive at Valentine's Day - just like diamonds and you know what they say about diamonds that cost a dime ....
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