Cut expenses, not flowers!

In a crisis it’s always important to stay calm, and keep things under control. Your clients and employees alike, all depend on your company to be the pillar of support during hard times. When expenses become your primary concern, steps are taken to cut down on spending in order to provide financial safety for the upcoming gray days. Where do we start first? We eliminate expenses associated with things we see around us. This approach, although practiced by a lot of companies, can actually bring about a negative effect, even though at first it seems like the right thing to do. For example, when you take a quick glance around you, you’ll probably notice the lovely violets on the table, or a sego plant occupying that dull corner. If you eliminate flowers and plants from your offices in order to cut back on costs, you may save a few quid, but you lose the relaxing atmosphere that comes with having flowers and plants around. Ask yourself if you would like to spend 8 hours a day in a solid, static, dull, uninspiring space, and concentrate on working harder… We need flowers and plants around us, they are there for a good reason.

It’s the hidden, deeper expenses that need to be addressed. In fact, most companies discover flaws in their financial profile only when they dig deeper into their operations, forced to do so by an economic crisis. Eliminating the very things that help create a relaxed working atmosphere, therefore a more productive atmosphere, will not solve your problems in the long run, in fact, it will only make everyone work under even more pressure. Needless to say, productivity will go south as well.

Looking at things from a different angle, you are to a large extent marketing yourself both to your clients and your own employees. You want to pass on a positive message, even though job cuts are inevitable. Bringing on a gloomy dark atmosphere of dread will certainly not help anyone. Do you want your clients, those who choose to carry on and keep bringing you business, to come in and sense your lack of morale? Do you want your employees to spend hours in melancholy, instead of working hard to survive the hard times? Probably not.

You may think stopping the little visible things can significantly help the overall budget. It’s the easy option sure, but it’s those little things that help create that great atmosphere in your working place, that every one of your employees enjoys. Instead, there are far more effective ways to cut down on spending like phone bills, travel expenses, mailing, transportation  but they do require a little more work to optimise. Cutting down on spending in these areas is an internal change, invisible to people outside the company, therefore your hard earned reputation will stay intact. For example, cutting back on travel expenses will bring more employees back to the office, where they will get more things done in a relaxed working atmosphere created by a vase of bright confident flowers, cheering the world as you greet your next client at the reception desk.

Table arrangement used for the event

We’re very happy and honoured to have been given the chance to decorate a small royal event at end of July, a dinner at the Westbury Hotel, with Prince (and princess) Michael of Kent as guests of honour.

Our part of the job was to create a formal but private atmosphere, befitting the presence of such extinguished individuals. The event was decorated with table arrangements and standing arrangements in four niches.

This was a great experience, where our professional approach was shown in full light. We were very excited and nervous at the same time – expectations were high, but luckily our experience and expertise helped us hit the target dead center.

We`ve been very busy in the past weeks working on projects for clients, but having finally taken 5 minutes for a cup of coffee with a friend the other day at a shopping mall, I couldn`t help but notice the way the whole building was decorated with plants and trees inside.

If you operate a shopping mall you know the importance of having plants to liven up that space. Usually, the parts of the shopping mall that are reserved for restaurants and coffee shops need to be somehow separated from the rest of the surrounding space to give visitors a way to enjoy a relaxation break.

While the usual approach with smaller to medium size plants will do the trick for smaller spaces, sometimes the space requires a somewhat different approach. Open spaces require bigger plants to adequately respond to the size of the space around it. Depending on the theme desired you could place, for example, palm trees in a particular area and bring a little tropical heat to the atmosphere.

Naturally, other trees are a good choice as well, such as the example below:

Image credit: rubey_kay

Whatever the choice and needs, we are always happy to take on a challenge, and create a unique solution for your visitors. in fact we are in the middle of a project for a client who operates a hotel. Stay tuned, we`ll be posting photos and stuff soon.

Plants and flowers always seem to be in the root (no pun intended) of every fashion trend, as we’ve seen in the example of designer dresses inspired partly by exotic flowers. This time we’d like to direct your attention towards a remarkable collection of photographs of shoes and accessories designed exclusively from plants and flowers. We can”t wear any of these, but it would be great if we could. The collection is part of Michel Tcherevkoff’s portfolio of photos and is called “Shoe Fleur: A Footwear Fantasy”. It has been exhibited in New York in 2007, and is now available on display in Paris, June through August 2008.

The idea came about while working on on a shoot for a client, and was captivated by a prop and the way a leaf followed the contour of a shoe. He spent the next couple of hours of the evening contemplating on this and ended up playing with plant’s forms, its shapes, bending and twisting, to produce these wonderful creations.

We’ve been working in the past weeks to enhance your experience on our site. Among the many planned additions to the content on our site, we are happy to announce the release of the Todich Floral Design product gallery, which contains all the products we offer as part of our services. With no particular order or categorisation, you are free to browse all the product images. In case you like a particular design, please jot down its unique identification code (shown under each image) and give it to us when you contact us.

This is by no means the end of development in this area. There are efforts being taken to improve this part of the site even further to allow you to use quite a sophisticated interface to let us know which designs and products you are interested in. Stay tuned!

Additionally, we are preparing some additional and informative content as well, especially for the weddings section, so look for an announcement about this very soon.

In case you haven’t been informed earlier, the Chelsea Flower Show is happening again. It was opened yesterday, 20 May, and will go on for four days, ending on 24 May. The event is taking place at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London SW3. It seems tickets have been sold out online, so you may have to chance it and try to get tickets at the venue.

Here’s just one photo of what can be seen at the show:

There is plenty of interesting content to enjoy at the show like changing climate studies and garden displays.

It’s orchids again…

Would you live in a house shaped as an orchid? Apparently, there is one available for just a couple of million pounds relatively close to London. The architects took the bee orchid as a model for designing the Orchid House – a very interesting approach to country living. It’s (or should be) located at Lower Mill Estate, here in the UK. Coincidentally (or not) there are a number of orchid species that can be found there, but it was the particular camouflage of the bee orchid that generated the design.

The house, to be built from laminated veneer lumbar (LVL) ribs and clad with timber shingles is to blend well with the environment, offering flexible living spaces, with the kitchen at the very center, and the surrounding space like a ‘whorl’ of leaves encircling the seed of the flower.

As far as interior flower decoration in the house, the architects didn’t say, but orchids seem like the way to go.

Flowers have been an inspiration for fashion designers since a long time ago. John Galliano’s latest work for the Christian Dior fall/winter 2008 collection shown recently show this only too well. He took the optimism of the sixties, amped by bright colours, as his inspiration. An interesting post on Trendinista points out, what’s at first a not so clear similarity between dress design and colours and the beautiful orchids. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a couple of shots from the post which illustrate what was said all to well:

It goes without saying that everyone one of us should do whatever we can to reduce the negative effect our lifestyles and businesses have on the environment. In fact, we’ve done a lot over the past years to ecologically improve our business operations to ensure we have the lowest possible ecological impact. Needless to say, this is far from over. There is always something new and different we can do to make things cleaner and greener. We are always happy to salute an effort in that direction. This time we salute a small company from France, called La Petite Reine.

We’ve all gotten used to having things delivered to our addresses in the cities. Many of you probably use our flower delivery services. What if there was a way to do this in an absolutely clean and environmentally safe way? The guys from La Petite Reine seem to have found an answer – human powered vehicles or Cargocycles as they call them. These are basically tricycles with a cargo space attached on the rear axle. The cargo space allows for about 180 kg of weight, or about 1400 litres of volume, to be delivered to distances of up to 30 km. The vehicle itself weighs only about 80 kg. Best of all, they are completely silent and emit no pollutants whatsoever.

Deliveries are so far available in three major cities in France – Bordeaux, Rouen, and Dijon, but the company is looking for partners in order to expand its services to other countries as well.

The road to a clean and green business is a long one, sometimes very slow even, but we will get there eventually with persistent efforts and a will to improve.

I am always amazed at the number of ways humans find to celebrate their love for flowers. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate – flowers as a motif for food, flower sculptures made from… well, flowers, and flower sculptures made from artificial materials. The possibilities are endless…

 

If you find any more cool examples of floral art, drop us a link in the comments. Maybe you’re a floral artist yourself – share your creations with us!