Orchid Production in a Global Economy

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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

January Is Self Love Month?

Posted on by
Reply

Did you know that January is ‘Self Love Month’? Well it is. But what does it mean for you?

In my opinion, it means that you have a reason to pamper yourself. For the past two months, you have shopped, cooked, & cleaned for others through the holiday season. Now this month is ‘all about me’.

While you are out running errands, picking up kids, or just leaving work, stop by, spend some time in our gift shop, enjoy the unique and distinctive smell of our flower shop. You may even want some flowers for yourself. After all you deserve it, just for being you.

Hope to see you soon.

Pam

P.S. If you haven’t visited downtown Wylie recently, please come on down. Downtown has some great restaurants and a variety of businesses that can be explored.