Chronicling VDay: Flowers, flowers everywhere.

Official Countdown: 4 days.
Current Weather Report: Either rain or 2-4" of snow arriving Sunday night into Monday. 

So this is the current state of our rose cooler:

Roses, roses everywhere.

Yay! It's still semi-organized!

We were busier today with regular orders, and since I was on daily orders I was only able to finish five more of my dozens. If you're keeping track, that puts me at thirty leaving twenty more to go. You can see all our dozens lining the shelves in that pic. All our loose roses are on the floor below.

And in this corner...

Another coworker spent all day doing these. Since she was able to finish her set, she's moving on to another design tomorrow and will just keep duplicating those. We've also started bud vases ahead of time in yet another, albeit smaller, cooler. 

So much prep work. But so grateful this much can be done in advance.

Finishing our sets or quotes sounds confusing. I'm trying to figure out how to explain it. Let's take, for example, my trying to complete 50 sets of red dozen roses.  That's what I mean. We have some pictures up of arrangements that we're specially selling and we have the flowers and vases for to reproduce that arrangement for you. We have enough vases to complete, say, 12 of them or 25. We'll complete all those in advance.
Also, we know we'll sell dozen roses. We know we'll sell bud vases. So we complete a certain number of those advance as well. That's what I mean by quota.


Tomorrow the plan is to stay an hour late to finish up some of those quotas, and then we'll be ready to move on into Saturday. That should be our big design day completing all of Monday's orders and getting them ready to go, plus mostly finishing our quotas for dozens, mixed, bud vases, specials, etc. And reorganizing Tuesday's orders so we know what's not sold out, how much we have left of each, what has to be delivered first, how many orders we have, etc, etc.

In other news, I would say our last shipment of Valentine's flowers came in today but that's no longer true. We learned today that our container of white lilies will no longer be arriving due to a mistake in shipment, so we'll be receiving those from another wholesaler tomorrow.

Sure, it's really upsetting that we weren't even notified that this pretty crucial and traditional flower would not be arriving, but with a holiday this large in the industry you do have to go with the flow. It would be more upsetting if our other wholesaler had not saved the day. We love her. (We loved her anyway.)

That being said, today's shipment of flowers was lovely! My boss bought a box of fresh bulb flowers this year to give us something different to play with and I've been so excited. Its rare we have these.

Okay, so the iris we always have, but the raunculus (center) and hyancith (front) is really rare.

 

 I looooove the raunculus.

The shape, the colors, the GORGEOUS GREEN CENTERS IN THE YELLOW ONES. Swoon.

Speaking of gorgeous product, we've been so lucky this year. Usually at a major holiday the flower quality tends to go down since a) the demand becomes incredibly high therefore b) they're pulled from the fields faster bringing us back to c) sadder looking flowers. However this year that has (somehow) not been the case. Not only have our flowers been nice, most of them have been downright beautiful. It's a total blessing. We're grateful, we're excited and I'm having so much fun with them.

Notably, however, this is where you start getting tired.