Thought I'd copy the entire article for everyone.
I, and the shop I worked with, were integral players in the birth of Bloomen. It was born as an alternative to TF and FTD etc.
V
Former forensic cop finds global success in flowers
Mon, April 30, 2007
Bob Dugdale is combining old-fashioned values with solid e-commerce practices to forge a winning formula for London and the world
By PAT CURRIE, SPECIAL TO SUN MEDIA
Gertrude Stein famously wrote, "A rose is a rose is a rose."
While her logic might be unassailable, if overstated, retired career cop Bob Dugdale brings his own analytical mindset -- honed by 10 years at the OPP forensic identification unit in London "to bear on the matter."
Not so much on roses in particular, but on the state of the flower shop business in London.
Going on 20 years as a flower shop owner in London, Dugdale realizes it's no stroll down Primrose Lane. He figures there are twice as many retail flower shops than the city's population of almost 350,000 can comfortably maintain, without taking into account the big grocery stores, Wal-Marts and Canadian Tires and weekend street-corner peddlers who have all staked out claims in the flower patch.
It's a situation Dugdale predicts will shake out the most vulnerable of the small independents. "I expected it before now," he confesses.
There's also a concern over the legitimacy of a number of so-called "local florists" listed on the Internet that are really fronts for distant order-scooping operations.
Customers falling for their deceptive advertising routinely get soaked for extra service charges scooped off the top by the phony "local florists" -- often nothing more than a call centre maybe thousands of miles distant from the community they purport to call home -- who then pass the order on to be filled by unsuspecting but genuine local businesses, making business even tougher for honest local dealers trying to survive in the hothouse of competition. The problem has triggered calls for more stringent regulation of Internet advertising.
Dugdale has been helping run the shop at Jim Anderson Flowers Ltd., 451 Dundas St., since he and his wife, Gloria, bought the business in 1988, four years after Bob had retired after a 30-year career with the OPP in Deep River, 240 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, and London. Since Gloria has fallen seriously ill, Bob now has taken over running the business.
"I've heard the comment that OPP staff who took the training and applied themselves in the forensic identification unit usually went on to some type of business after retirement. Most coppers just retire, put their feet up, and are dead within a year," he says.
The Dugdales' connection with the flower business goes back to his 20-year OPP posting in Deep River when Gloria worked for a local florist and Bob "helped out at busy times." Within days of Bob's transfer to London in 1985, Gloria was again working in the business and they bought the Anderson flower shop three years later.
Attention to detail and a readiness to identify and grasp opportunity has put their little shop on the world stage. Thanks to the Internet, it's a big stage.
Dugdale believes his shop is the only agency in Canada for FloraQueen, Europe's biggest online flower-ordering centre, dealing in 10 languages with its global network of member florists in countries spanning the alphabet from Andorra to Vietnam.
Based in Barcelona, Spain, FloraQueen gathers e-mailed orders for flowers from all over the world and relays them to its member flower shop closest to the order's destination. All of FloraQueen's orders for North American customers are relayed through Dugdale's shop in London.
Dugdale's shop is also a member of Bloomen Direct, a Mississauga-based online clearing house that gathers and relays flower orders across Canada and the United States.
"We served as the consulting shop when Bloomen was formed. We're also minority shareholders," Dugdale notes.
Orders from FloraQueen, Bloomen Direct and TeleFlora, a California-based order house, "keep us a little busier" than the shop would normally be in filling local orders, Dugdale says. Relaying the computerized orders also provides a secondary source of income.
Within North America, there's a sliding scale of such payments, usually in the range of $5 to $8, Dugdale says. "Plus they also pay us a fee of 17 per cent of the amount of the order," he adds.
"But some shops tack on a $5-$8 relay fee of their own, which is passed on to the customer, and a relayed order to a shop outside North America, the added fee to the customer can be $15. Some other shops may charge as much as $20," Dugdale says
And that's where Dugdale breaks ranks with the florist industry. The old cop has firm ideas about what's fair.
"I don't agree with that. It's double-dipping, because they are getting paid at the other end (through the percentage fee) already," he says.
Sometimes less is more and there's a bonus for virtue. "We don't charge the extra fee. What we've discovered is that sometimes the customer uses the money saved to increase the size of the order," which in turn increases Dugdale's percentage.
He also runs a sideline business called A@C Recycling and Outfitters in a building next to the flower shop. "We're trying to be green. We'll take back all glass and plastic dishes used in flower displays, reuse them or refurbish them and sell them to other dealers," he says.
Ah, the sweet smell of success. From a forensics lab cluttered with copies of fingerprints and photographs of crime scenes to a charming little shop bright with blossoms and redolent with their sweet scent.
"After a while you don't notice it. It's like working in a cheese factory," Dugdale says.
Like he's recounting facts to a not-too-bright jury, Dugdale gathers up the threads of his life story and explains how he has come to this journey down the garden path, so to speak.
"Gloria worked in a florist shop in Deep River for a couple who were more friends than bosses. We used to socialize a lot. I did a lot of part-time work there during busy times, got somewhat familiar with it" Bob says.
When the Dugdales moved to London in 1985, Bob found himself working at London District OPP headquarters "with a guy whose brother-in-law, Nick Weyers, ran Creekside Gardens, a Third Street flower wholesale business supplying local shops. He asked if my wife was interested in working in the business.
"Just at this time, Jim Anderson had left this shop to open another flower shop of York Street.
"Things started to happen fast. We arrived from Deep River on Thursday, the furniture came on Friday, Gloria saw Stella Leff, who owned the building at 451 Dundas, on Saturday and started to work on Monday.
"We knew very quickly this business was for sale. Gloria had a couple years here, gained some intimate knowledge of how this shop worked, before we made an offer."
The Dugdales bought the shop in January 1988, but kept the Anderson name, something quite common in the London flower trade.
Being a hard-headed realist, Dugdale is aware his small staff knows far more about the business than he does. "The only one who doesn't have to be here is me," he says
Cathy "Cats" Rankin, Kate McDonald and Geraldine Peters among them have a combined total of 110 years experience in the floral trade.
Rankin and her husband Jim had Rankins Flowers on Richmond Street for 28 years. "Rankins, Gammage and Dampiers, they're all related --we are a flower family," Cathy says. All now are owned outside the family and still operate under the family names.
McDonald started as an apprentice in the trade in Sarnia in 1962, and Peters boasts she's "been in the business for 37 years." Her family for years owned Taylor Flowers at Barker and Cheapside streets.
Getting involved as an owner soon carried Dugdale into a political fight over the proliferation of weekend venders peddling flowers on busy street corners all across London. "An outfit in Windsor was bringing in flowers by the cube-van load and setting up these peddlers," Dugdale says. "They were unfair competition that didn't pay any business taxes."
Dugdale has dug up "an interesting statistic. It has been proven that a population of 5,000 will very nicely support one retail flower shop. For instance, Sault Ste. Marie has just over 75,000 people and 15 flower shops that all do quite well.
"Based on London's population, this city should have about 40 flower shops. We, in fact, approach 75 registered flower shops and that doesn't include grocery stores, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire," Dugdale says.
The added competition from the unlicensed weekend peddlers meant too many weeds in an overcrowded patch. Dugdale chaired a committee of local florists who pressed city hall to regulate "pirate" posy pushers. "We knew we couldn't eliminate them but we got the city to charge them a licence fee substantial enough to at least thin them out," he says.
"Did it help us? Not much," he says.
However, the battle brought Dugdale together with a young Mississauga go-getter named Mike Knorr "whose mother, Bridget Greenslade, had Campbell Flowers on Adelaide Street near Cheapside," Dugdale recalls.
"It strange the way the story all weaves together," he says, reflectively.
The Dugdales acted as consultants (and minority stockholders) while Knorr founded Bloomen Direct "an almost completely hands-off service that automatically directed flower orders by e-mail or fax" to members' shops across Canada. The network has members in every province, some 200 in Ontario alone located in communities ranging in size from Toronto (2.2 million) to Shanty Bay (383).
Dugdale says he got in because "I really wanted to see an online ordering business for flowers and plants gift baskets I really wanted to promote free relaying of orders around North America."
Then the online search engine Google relegated Bloomen Direct to relative obscurity "and our own orders dropped by 90 per cent. We decided to carry on, typing in the orders manually through TeleFlora" (an online order-relaying network has 25,000 member flower shops in Canada and the United States and 20,000 more outside North America.)
Meanwhile, the Jim Anderson Flowers entry listed in Bloomen Direct's web page site had attracted the attention of FloraQueen. The European giant suddenly started sending orders "just before Mother's Day last May."
FloraQueen operates in 10 languages through a vast network of flower shops running the alphabet of countries from Andorra to Vietnam.
Now Anderson Flowers is at the point where its Internet order-relaying service can guarantee delivery "basically the next day" while competing agencies "usually take two or three days, sometimes four or five at the busiest times," Dugdale says.
Meanwhile, Jim Anderson Flowers has become part of a global trade in blossoms, ferns, moss and other ingredients that go into floral arrangements.
"Our flowers are mainly from local growers but we get roses from South America and this green stuff -- it's called tree fern --from Florida. There are farms of it there as far as the eye can see
