The one million pound email

It just happened! Not six months in and we hit the one million pound mark! Below is a shot of the automated email that got sent out to all of us. Amazon had a bell, we hired Dr Evil :)

More mothers than lovers

It is the day before 'M' Day and we are all set to take more orders than we did for Valentine's Day just a month ago. It is a simple fact I suppose, there are more mothers than lovers and so of course we should be busier.

In hindsight it is easy to see that we shouldn't be surprised, its just that in the six months that the site has been live our attention has been focused on Valentine's Day as the benchmark. I remember Steve casually saying in the dying hours of Feb 14th that it was just 30 days until Mother's Day and that it would be the same. A little hard to imagine when sleep had become optional for most of the florists!

Mother's Day presented another fact, that a majority of mothers live outside of London. Meaning that we would not require the same 30 vans to deliver across London on the day in question. We would have to instead ensure we have enough boxes to send our flowers across all over the UK.


Mass of pink roses


Getting ready to be packed


Steve taking boxes to the Parcel Force lorry


Steve stretching his legs inside the lorry



Alina chosing to join Steve in the lorry ;)

It's all made of sand

Phoebe, like any child loves sand. These photos were taken in August 2006, she was just over 2 with a passion for sand like no other.

To get to the beach we took my dad's boat out to Blakeney spit which includes a Seal colony. Other than the seals and ourselves there were perhaps two other people - amazing!

Arena - Valentines Day

So, this is a little late. My only excuse is that I didn't have a blog before now and so could not post during the most important day for an online florist.

I joined Arena as a full time employee in the beginning of January 2007 (the site went live in September 2006 but that is another story) and from day one we were gearing up for V day. Valentine's day is always a busy day for anyone with flowers, but we had exploded onto the market place and were expecting a busy week :)

The night before we worked until 2am packing and organising - we had over 3000 orders to deliver, an awesome responsibility when you consider you are assisting someones relationship.

The day was a complete sucess and even included an interview with the BBC!

Below are relevant links to photos and youtube!

Photos: Click here

Video (BBC Clip) : Click Here

The first post!

An upgrade from bBlog to blogger - second time is most certainly lucky as this is a vast improvement. The add image icon is currently teasing me, to say nothing of the edit html tab...

Ah yes, the blog a thing of joy, something that is truly justifiable now that I have a decent UI :)