FTD, Teleflora, 1800 Flowers & DOGS from a Fellow Florist in Illinois

You may all be wondering why I’m posting three links for all of you. Yes, they are our competition only because people let them be. Feel free to take a look at each one & all their negative nightmarish comments from Mother’s Day. You will understand why I’m posting this. The thing that bothers me most is many times these companies will blame the local florists for the unhappy customers of theirs.
THAT IS UPSETTING!

We used to be a filling shop for all three of the big ones until we caught them being very deceitful in ripping off people before sending us the orders that they then ripped us off for. Our good name & reputation meant more to us since we work so hard for each & every one of our customers.
Long story short….we FIRED all of them & people are finally starting to realize why you should shop local, which I’ve been saying that for a very long time without all of these explanations.
HAPPY COMMENT READING!

https://www.facebook.com/teleflora
https://www.facebook.com/FTDflowers
https://www.facebook.com/1800flowers

Teleflora, FTD, 1800Flowers, etc. are all just order takers. They collect your money, excessive fees and then forward what is left to the local florist who is required to fill the order for half of what you paid for it. They don’t even pass on the unbelievable high delivery fees to the florist, they keep it all. GREEDY! Contact your local florist next time and get your order filled for the full value of the money that you paid for it, not half of what you paid for it.
AND…..anytime you google search a florist, you will always see names at the top area. They are ALL deceitful order gatherers (DOGS) that pay millions each holiday to take away from local florists. It’s a big business. There are also listings that look like a flower shop name but again, they bought many domain names to pose as a real florist. If you see a toll free number only & no physical address…you’ve found a DOG! If you ever have an order to send out somewhere far, feel free to contact me, I will give you a phone number of a Real Local Florist. Another way to find one is to type in florist in (town, state) on the facebook search box. There you should be able to find florists listed on fb that you can look at some of their designs & look for yourself & decide.
I’m just trying to educate people as the the Whys & Why Nots

Why are flowers at a funeral service important?

wylieflowershopfuneral

Sympathy flowers make a difference in the atmosphere at a funeral.  They can be a fitting tribute to someone’s life.  They comfort the grieving and allow others to express their love and compassion.

Funerals are designed for the survivors and to commemorate the deceased person’s life, interest, and passions.  They also help the survivors deal with their grief.

My great grandfather was a funeral director in Royse City and my great grandmother was a florist in Dallas.  Both instilled the importance of flowers at a funeral.  Because of this great importance that has been passed down through the generations, Wylie Flower Shop sends a spray of flowers to every deceased at our local funeral home.  We call it a “temporary spray” until it is replaced by a casket spray ordered by the family.  If a casket spray is not ordered, then at least, the deceased will have some flowers.

Years ago, funeral services took many days to plan and carry out.  Today funeral services are rather quick.  Our website, www.wylieflowershop.com has become very convenient for families and friends, being spread out, who cannot always pack up and go to a funeral.  Photographs of sympathy work can help a person, who usually hasn’t had to deal with this event before, pick out a floral tribute just perfect for their loved one.

What does a person send to a funeral service?  That depends.  There are more and more cremations today.  There may be a regular service with the visitation (viewing the deceased) and then afterwards, a cremation or afterwards, the traditional burial.  As a florist it is important to know, so that the appropriate product can be sent.

Traditional designs, such as easel sprays, hearts, crosses, and round wreaths, prevail as the favorite products if there will be a burial.  However, those traditional styles would not be appropriate if there is to be a cremation.  A plant or pretty arrangement,  that can be taken home, by a family member would be a better choice of product.  The small flat sprays have fallen by the wayside, however plants have become one of the favorite gifts because it is a living memorial to the deceased.

We have many gifts that can be incorporated into the floral tribute {such as photo frames with their picture or a favorite ball team’s emblem, plaques, angels, religious icon and figurines, memory lamps} or that can stand alone as an appropriate sympathy expression.  We can and will also incorporate items of the deceased, such as a favorite cap or a cowboy hat, the family brings in.  Wylie Flower Shop has the ability to create customized shape pieces such as guitars, sports themes, tractors, rainbows, tweety bird and so forth.

We offer advice after listening to stories of memories of the love one.  We try to promote flowers as an expression of your feelings toward the surviving, which in turn will help them through the grieving process.  We accommodate the customer’s special flower and color requests.  We often pull flowers from the cooler to give families as much visual assistance as possible.  The families are provided a private consultation area to make their selections of the perfect tribute.

Because, flowers truly do convey emotions, my one request would be that instead of using the words “in lieu of flowers” in the obituary, the families and funeral directors would use the following words “in addition to flowers, donations may be made to…”.

Thanks so much,

Pam

The Calla Lily is a Strange Flower……

The Calla Lilly is a strange flower suitable to any occasion. From simple romance, weddings, special events, and even to the end of time celebrating a loved ones life, the callas’ versatility continues to make them a star.

Did you know that the calla lily isn’t even related to the lily family at all? They are members of the Zantedeschia family. The showy, colored spath is the leaf-like organ that surrounds the true flower, the thick, tubular-shaped spadix. There are standard and miniature calla lilies. Many more colors are available in the miniature callas than the standard.

When handling callas, avoid touching the flower heads because they bruise easily. To maximize the vase life of callas, re-cut the stems with a sharp blade at an angle and place in freshly made flower food every 3 days. Re-cutting the stems every 24-48 hours will help prevent the stems from splitting and curling up. Callas can maintain their beauty from four days to two weeks, depending on the variety, their treatment, and display location. Callas should not be placed in direct sun or near drafts, refrigerators, televisions, or any heat-generating appliance.

With proper care and placement these beauties will remain in the spotlight for years to come!

Pam

 

The Powerful Language of Flowers During Times of Sympathy

Flowers symbolize the life cycle of humans from birth through death. Both humans and flowers have fragile lives and both need proper conditions to grow and thrive. In death, flowers symbolize how the beauty of creation is temporary, just as life is temporary. Flowers have special aesthetic value for their beauty helps balance our emotional response to the perceived ugliness of death.

In older days, the sweet fragrance of funeral flowers would mask the decomposing body odors. Today people send flowers to funerals because it is a visual expression of love, sympathy and respect; it’s a way of sharing the burden of grief and community support for those grieving. Flowers’ warmth and beauty add to the dignity and consolation of the funeral service. After the funeral service, the bereaved is left with a “memory picture” of the final tribute of their loved one. The more comforting the “memory picture” is the more easily it is to recall the final tribute, thus the more vivid is their reality of loss.

The bereaved never see in their “memory picture” flowers that wither and die, but always recall the beauty of the final tribute. People who have attended funerals with no flowers have expressed the feeling that something was missing and the funeral was depressing. Finally flowers are not only for the living , they are for the dead too. Flowers help express respect for the dead which in turn honors the dead and consoles the living.

Gathering and arranging flowers around our dead is society’s oldest form of mourning and honoring those we have lost.

Thanks for visiting our blog,

Pam

How To Order Prom Flowers

Each year we get a new crop of juniors and returning seniors (fresh off their junior year and ready to take on the world) that have to get ready for their Prom. Here is a few pointers to get you started and help you along the way.

  • Visit your local flower shop at least one to two weeks prior to your prom.This will allow the florist to special order the flowers you want.
  • Bring in a swatch (clothing sample) of your dress or your date’s dress to match the ribbon for your prom wrist-let and/or boutonniere. You can even bring the dress itself.
  • Ask your date if she has a favorite flower or what her favorite color is. By using her favorite flower and/or color you can personalize her prom flowers and make her feel even more special.
  • If you and your date come into the flower shop seperately, make sure you tell each other what you ordered or get the order# so the flower shop can match the wrist corsage with the boutonniere.
  • Have the money to pay for your flowers upon placing your order.
  • Visit our online prom gallery http://www.wylieflowershop.com/gallery_prom.php to get an idea of what you would like to order. There are a lot of examples on the website of our designers work from previous proms and from fashion sources.
  • Trust your florist to make your beautiful prom flowers, After all, they’re the experts.

Each of our designers have made 100’s to 1000’s  of corsages, wrist-lets, and boutonnieres, plus we stay current with the latest trends and designs. Please stop by so we can assist with your prom needs.

Pam

Orchid Production in a Global Economy

Did you know orchids are a little harder to come by lately and the price may be just a tad higher than before?

Heavy flooding caused by monsoons in southeast Asia has created a lot of obstacles for Thailand’s orchid industry. The flood problems range from destroying orchid plants, making harvest impossible, and making deliveries to the airport on flooded or closed roads wearisome.

Thailand is the world’s largest producer of dendrobium orchids, generally two million stems a day (wow!!). Their government estimates that flooding affected more that two million acres. It takes more than a year to replace damaged orchid plants. Although only 10% of the flooded areas were orchid farms, the industry has been disrupted. Thus, the beautiful flower is even more special today.

Thanks for stopping by,

Pam

Flower Coolers are Timeline

It’s the day after Valentine and the shop is trying to recover from the busiest day of the year. The whole staff has worked very hard the last week preparing for V-Day and it appears to have been a great success. Pam & I want to thank all of our loyal customers for their business and for being part of the Wylie family. Wylie has grown greatly the last 10 years but it’s citizens carry the small town attitudes and values that make living in Wylie so fulfilling.

Thinking of how Wylie has grown, Monday while I was in the delivery area, I looked over at our original flower cooler and it triggered memories of how Wylie Flower Shop had grown. In fact, our coolers are like a timeline (facebook users are getting real familiar with that term) of Wylie Flower & Gift Shop.

When Pam & I bought the shop in 1994 from her parents, there was one brown wooden flower cooler about 8’L x 6′ W x 6′ H. A couple of years ago when I was putting a memories dvd for Martha & Bobby’s 50th Wedding Anniversary party, I came across a picture of Bobby King holding Pam (at about 2 years old)  in his arms in front of that same brown flower cooler. That was about 1966 or so and I don’t know how long they had had the cooler at that point..

At some point before 1994, Bobby had added a cooler unit to the old bank vault (yes, the shop building was once a bank, a butcher, general store, etc..)  inside the flower shop for use during the busier days and also added two reach-in showroom coolers. 

Back to present time, next to the brown coolers, is a white cooler that is about 10’L x 6’W x 6’H. The white cooler was added in the late 1990’s and the white cooler was placed along side the wooden cooler near the cash register. Business had been growing and we were having to use our wedding chapel at valentine’s for overflow. The candle store fire of 1999 destroyed the wedding chapel and when we rebuilt, we decided to extend our gift shop.

Growing right along with Wylie, in around 2000 we added our large showroom cooler that is approximately 20’L x 8’W x 8’H. and moved the brown and white coolers to the delivery area. Wylie kept growing and since we no longer had our wedding chapel for overflow, we rented POD’s, refrigerated trucks, or refrigerated semi-trailers during the busy valentine season. Neither the semi-trailers or the refrigerated trucks had ramps, so we made make shift stairs. The staff (myself included) climbed those stairs tens of thousands of times retrieving flowers and storing arrangements for delivery.

After years of planning, in 2007 we added a large flower cooler and processing room onto the back of the shop that is 32’L x 12’W x 8′-10’H. During Valentine & Mother’s Day it serves as refrigerated flower & delivery storage, then during Fall, it is transformed into the Homecoming Showroom. The rest of year it is used for weddings, overflow, and storage.

Marilyn Hargrove came to work at our shop as a teenager and as teenagers often do, they leave and come back only to leave again. Well, Marilyn is now 29 years old and now works part-time at the shop during the peak periods. She made the comment today that she tells everyone that when she started to work at Wylie Flower Shop, “they only had one flower cooler” and “this was her 14th Valentine to work at Wylie Flower Shop”.

Funny how things we come in contact with everyday and don’t give a second thought, are a reflection on you, your family, your history. In this case, a set of flower coolers of all different sizes are a reflection on the growth of Wylie and the Wylie Flower & Gift Shop.

Thanks for reading,

Danny

It’s All About Memories that Will Last a Lifetime

A couple of weeks ago, Pam and I were chit chatting with some married friends of ours when the husband made the comment “I think the two biggest rip offs are seafood and flowers! I would rather have a nice juicy steak than seafood any day and florists’ gouge you at Valentine’s and they are already overpriced anyway, and to beat that they are going to die so what’s the point”. As the wife shook her head embarrassingly, Pam tried to explain to him that at Valentine’s our vendors raise the prices and that for years we kept the price the same but over the last few years we raised our rose prices by $10 a dozen during Valentine. She also pointed out that for a lot of florists, the business during Valentine’s season is what keeps the doors open the rest of the year. His comments rolled around in my brain for the last few weeks and I will admit, I have heard the similar comments before.  This may take several blog entries to cover, but I want to attempt to address his issues.

Now during my high school years, I wasn’t the most handsome guy. In fact as a youth I was often referred to as the “red headed freckle faced kid” even though I didn’t think my hair was red. The one thing I learned early was that girls (and ladies) love attention. One of the ways of showing my affection was to send flowers to school (I also made sure and purchased homecoming mums and prom corsages). As I grew older, I kept this tradition. When I went on my first date with Pam, I purchased a dozen roses and brought them to her when I picked her up. That is a memory that Pam still has and mentions from time to time, in fact sometimes brags to customers.

And I guess that’s why some guys don’t get it. It’s not about the flowers’ cost or that they will expire, it’s about the feeling of giving, receiving, and the memories that will be triggered throughout a lifetime. That juicy steak after you eat is only a memory, and I have some great memories of steak also. But I have some great memories of occasions where I purchased flowers and they last a lifetime. Several years ago, we sent my mother a dozen roses for her birthday. Mother went on and on about them and then mentioned that my late father had never gave her a dozen roses. My grandmother would often say “don’t bring flowers to my grave, bring them to me when I’m alive so that I can smell them”. We know she was just using flowers as an example, she wanted us to show her love while she was alive and could enjoy it, not after she had passed. Flowers create memories, but the love that is portrayed by the thought is priceless.

I want to also touch on one other thing. In the next few weeks, you will be barraged with radio ads for Pro Flowers, FTD, 1800Flowers, with some amazing, almost to good to be true deals. Two dozen roses for 29.99, etc… Please know those flowers will be delivered in a box to your doorstep. Your spouse, loved one, family member, or friend, will then have to cut each stem, place then in a vase while attempting to arrange them. This is akin to going to the grocery store, buying steaks, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, wine, etc… bringing them home and having your spouse, loved one, family member, or friend, clean the potatoes, make the salad, cook the steak, and serve on the table, then clean the dishes afterwards.

Think about that! That’s the reason the flowers are sooo cheap. You wouldn’t and  shouldn’t treat your loved one that way. Those items purchased at the grocery store are going to cost less than going to a restaraunt and ordering the same thing, but at the restaurant you are served, satisfied, and you don’t have to clean up. Why wouldn’t you do the same thing with flowers? There is no WOW in having to get the flowers in a box,  putting them together, and then cleaning up afterwards, because there will be a mess.

Put the WOW back in Valentine’s and have your flowers professionally designed and hand delivered to your loved one. We guarantee you both will be satisfied.

Thanks for visiting.

Danny

What the heck just happened?

Have you ever visited a website, possibly selected some items to view or purchase, and boom, screen disappears or everything on the screen is suddenly not where its’ supposed to be, the list of examples goes on. You may even repeat the process and it happens again, maybe it doesn’t happen again. Well what caused the problem to begin with? Was it my computer, was it a virus, was it spy ware, was it a bug on the website, do I need to buy one of those infomercial software’s to fix my PC?? There are several culprits that could be the root but it may just be your web browser!

My background on computers runs back to the mid 80’s and my job titles ranged from Operations supervisor  at a data center for a manufacturing facility to Programming Development Manager for a Produce Distribution company. So, a few years ago I started looking into website development and boy did my head start to spin. To program a modern website today, you must know multiple programming languages and a lot more about the technologies involved.

After a couple of years of dabbling with a test website and a small fortune on books, last year I decided to buckle down and do this. So I began working on a website using an open source shopping cart as a starter and began heavily modifying it. Now one thing I had read in my learning’s was that the website needed to work in all the available browsers. No problem I thought, I use Internet Explorer and sometimes FireFox so everything should look hunky dory. Boy did I still have more lessons to learn.

Now all of you who use Windows have received those notifications that updates are available for your PC. Most think those updates are just for security vulnerabilities and also to correct any bugs or issues as they like to call them in the Windows software. To most it doesn’t dawn on them that sometimes those updates are for the internet browser itself. Windows comes with Internet Explorer (IE for short) and of course there were several lawsuits over that issue. What you may not know is there have been as many revisions and updates to IE as there have been to the Windows Operating system itself. Each version of IE has known issues that were not resolved and updates came out to replace them. Unless your computer is very old (like original Windows or Windows 95), it could be running IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, IE7, IE8, or the newest IE9 (to use IE9 I think it is still a requirement  to use Windows 7).

IE 6 was known to have a lot of issues, IE 7 was better, IE 8 was even better and the jury is still out on IE 9 but it looks good so far. Well you may ask, why not just fix the bugs and everything would work fine. Well as technology progresses, new toys become available to make your website more friendly by adding bells & whistles. Website designers and owners are often eager to have the latest and greatest, so they enhance their website to take advantage of these advances.

Where the rub comes in is that sometimes these new brainstorms don’t work properly in older browsers. In fact the older the browser, the less likely it is functioning to the capability that the developer designed. In fact, in some browsers it just may crash. Now good designers try to test all of their websites with all the browsers out there, but that is not completely possible. As I explained, there are different versions of IE. There are also different versions of FireFox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera, and the list goes on. Also, each one of these browsers have neat add-ons to make your browser experience more robust. Guess what, those add-ons can also make your website bomb.

Now I can’t guarantee that it you have the latest updates to your browsers that you will not receive some unexpected event, but the possibilities are less. That’s also not to say that the website you visit may not be cutting edge and not have all those neat bells and whistles but still may throw an error, but most browsers do better with backward capabilities than forward capabilities. So you have the latest updates, and still getting errors or unexpected events? It could be those add-ons. I have had several occasions when developing the www.wylieflowershop.com  website that things didn’t work as I designed, would work on one computer and not another, it turned out that the addons to the browser was having unforseen effects on the website. The addons can usually be easily removed or disabled but you can see where the different scenarios could drive a web designer crazy and make you wonder what the heck just happened.

Regards, Danny