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Here are the changes to our opening times for Mother’s Day 2013

We often get asked if there are more photos of our work available online. It’s something I’d been meaning to improve about our website since forever. Hopefully, now the new site is up and running, I’ll be able to start including more photos of our work.

It’s problematic for a couple of reasons though.

The first problem is purely practical. In all the hustle and bustle of running a busy shop it’s often tricky to find the extra few minutes it takes to take the photographs. Yeah, OK, it only takes 10 seconds to point a camera and click the shutter but for a photo to look any good you have to do a bit of fussing around first, e.g. the background needs to be fairly plain, and the lighting needs to be good etc. This can be surprisingly time-consuming. I think I’ve got a way to streamline this, by using a moveable background and a white bit of board to reflect light back onto the subject, and a few other simple bits and pieces like that.

The second problem is to do with ideas about privacy respect for our customer’s wishes. Once I’ve made a flower arrangement, I feel that it really belongs to the customer, and it wouldn’t really be very fair of me to broadcast photos of other people’s stuff on the internet. Imagine if hundreds of people got to see your surprise birthday bouquet before you did. OK, some people might be fine with that, but many wouldn’t and it’s not appropriate for me to assume.

I think this is a trickier problem to solve. I’m keen to avoid getting into any kind of paperwork-based permission bureaucracy, so the idea I’m considering is to always make sure I leave a delay of a couple of weeks (maybe more?) between delivering the work, and putting the photos on the internet. That way the customer gets to ‘own’ the work for the whole time the flowers are looking their best. Then when they start to wilt, I think it might be fair for me to use the images to promote my business.

As ever, I’m interested in your comments on this. Do you think this would be enough to safeguard my customers’ ownership of my work? Add your comments below!

Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic Licence.

Helium, the lighter-than air gas that makes our balloons float, is pretty curious stuff. Most gases, like oxygen or nitrogen, are trapped in the atmosphere by the earth’s gravity; they go up and come back down and are constantly circulated and re-circulated by the weather. But not helium; once helium is released into the atmosphere it rises, higher and higher, and keeps on rising, all the way out into space! Helium’s also a chemical element. It’s not made of anything else in the way that, say water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, so there’s no realistic way we can manufacture it

Consequently, it’s pretty much inevitable that the world will run out of helium one day.

Unfortunately, Helium has some uses more important than inflating party decorations. The huge magnets that make MRI scanners and the Large Hadron Collider (as well as many other important science experiments) work are cooled with liquid helium, because that’s the only we we have of getting them down to the required temperature, just a few degrees about absolute zero.

So, what I’m basically trying to explain is this. I don’t feel it’s very responsible of me to sell helium any more. How can I carry on wasting a finite and valuable resource in such a frivolous way? It seems likely we’ll get to a stage where scientific experiments like the Large Hadron Collider will stop, and people will be forced to do without life-saving medical scans, and all because it’s how we like to keep our parties decorated in the early twenty-first century.

So, that’s my decision made then really. I’ve got a part bottle of helium in my shop at the moment. Once that’s all sold I don’t intend to get any more. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience this might cause but I hope after reading this, you understand my reasons.

Further reading

A Ballooning Problem: The Great Helium Shortage. The Independent newspaper, 4 Jan 2013

Helium shortage prompts scientist’s balloon use warning. BBC News website, 21 Sept 2012

Here’s a very quick update, just to give you the following list of prices. As usual, these are just our suggestions. We can create almost anything you need, even if it’s not on this list. Just call us to discuss your requirements.

Three-rose arrangement in geometric tank vase, £25

Single rose in gift bag with hand made porcelain heart pendant, £15.

Who will be your sweetheart?

As I write, Valentine’s day is exactly two weeks away, so while it’s worth starting to think about it, you’ve still got plenty of time to plan what you want to do.

As usual we’re expecting roses to be very expensive. It’s just an unfortunate example of supply and demand in action; everybody in the whole world wants them on the same day and the growers can only produce so many, so there’s a big spike in wholesale prices that we have to pass on to our customers.

We think our mixed bouquets are better value. In the past we’ve done a lot of tropical valentines bouquets based on anthuriums (heart shaped tropical flowers) that we were very proud of.  So I think we can produce something to fit just about any budget.

Anyway, here’s a brief list of approximate guide prices. These are the prices if you order today and they might change nearer the day.

It helps us to help you better if you can get your order to us in the next week or so. Give us a ring! 01226 745808. J x

On 3 January 2013, the day we first re-opened after the break for Christmas and New Year, the lovely Gail joined us here at Flowers Of Distinction. Some of you might remember her from the Buds And Blooms florist shop which was on Racecommon Road in Barnsley town centre.

Gail’s a very experienced florist so brings lots of skills with her and has already taught me a lot. Her help with the day-to-day running of the shop also means I get a chance to think a bit more about how I want to organise the business in more general terms. For example, I’ve been meaning to re-organise the website for a couple of years now and with one thing and another, I’ve struggled to get anywhere with it. It’s the same with a lot of things; day-to-day responsibilities mean you never get around to the bigger things, so they sit there, near the bottom of your to-do list, month after month.

So here we are, a new start in so many ways. New opening times (see sidebar), new staff, new website and the best thing, it’s working really well. January can often be a quiet month for florists, people are still recovering financially from Christmas, there are few weddings (and so it follows, few anniversaries), all those flowery special occasions are simply less frequent in this long dark stretch of the winter.

This year’s different though; we’re nearing the end of the busiest January I can remember. In such uncertain times as these, making such a big change was pretty frightening, but I’m thrilled to be able to say, it’s all working, and better than before, and I am amazed.

So, many thanks to customers old and new, from Flowers Of Distinction or Buds and Blooms. Here’s to the future! Cheers!