Florist News

orchidlover · #11 (**permalink**) 12-05-2007, 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tony

u mean every month lol

but on a serious note its a huge problem with many wholesalers

the biggest problem is with late orders that one has to buy from some of the larger cash and carries in holland because at 2 in the afternoon they are the only ppl with the stock and often that stock is old and we dont know when it was bought.

I handle stock in differant ways if someone orders flowers in advance i will always use that days auction flowers (the only real exception being on certain wedding lines which i will often buy on a monday rather than tuesday auction, crystal blush calla for example will often be a lot cheaper on a monday) . At the moment i am sitting in the office working out my buy list for mondays auction for tuesdays orders and general stock requirement.

The problem is with my roling stock in the wharehouses u florists expect me to carry the stock risk for your shops a lot of the time, which means u want us to have everything all of the time . The way i look at it overall is in terms of stock value to turnover rate . I try to make sure that our stock value is never more than double our daily turnover. However we all know what its like on a normal week i would expect to sell about a 1000 red roses a day but some weeks for no real reason red rose sales drop off and we have too much stock so i will have bought for the following day when i dont need them. What i do is "hide" that fresh stock and sell roses that are a day older than they should be. the only alternative is to increase margins . The other really important thing is to be honest with customers about the age of stock (and i dont mean when things are just a day old lol)and not to keep cold stores too cold to hide the age. I find that if u cold store roses they look perfect for ages but 2 days later are crap . The same roses kept at about 12 C look slightly open after a few days but still have good vase life and are perfect for funeral work.

i just wish i could just sell ordered flowers then my life would be easy lol

Tony, really interesting hearing your side . I do just wish that more wholesalers could be a bit more honest. Its fine if youve got the time to go and choose own stock but sometimes we get cxxp sent when we have deliveries that have been faxed through. My biggest bugbear though.........pricing! Some -and i mean my local - wholesalers have no prices at all (labelled i mean) this drives me mad and wastes so much time, we want to be able to walk in and see whats the best value. (i'm talking about a medium sized dutch importer here) Your thoughts appreciated.

tony · #12 (**permalink**) 16-05-2007, 04:30 PM

Pricing can be a hard one

here is the problem, I buy passion roses off mondays auction to sell at 65p and still have some left when the next ones arrive at 55p . If i labled everything i would end up throwing away the 65p ones which would mean i need a higher margin and my customers would end up paying more or being forced to buy elsewhere.

What we try and do is always have printed price lists for the day and serve the customers as they go round as far as possible