Arena Flowers increases ecommerce capacity by 300%
UK ethical florist Arena Flowers has boosted its ecommerce capacity by automating its gift card insertion and sorting process
Arena Flowers chose a bespoke mail inserting and sorting solution from Kern, a complex system involving an inserter machine to place greetings cards in envelopes and a sortation machine with barcode readers to sort cards into different batches and be matched with the correct bouquet of flowers.
Going live just in time for Mother’s Day, the new system meant 46 members of staff could be re-deployed elsewhere in the business, representing a huge saving in labour costs on the sorting, batching and mailing process. The result being that the solution will pay for itself within three years.
Another challenge the new solution helped solve was an operational one. Unlike many of its competitors, Arena Flowers did not want an enclosed document wallet on the outside of each flower box, containing the recipient’s address along with a courier bar code and personal message.
“We didn’t feel this is what our customers wanted, as it doesn’t convey a message in a way that complements the flowers, usually to celebrate a special occasion,” explained Arena CEO John Hackett. “The new method not only attaches an ID barcode to a highly personalised card, creates a courier label and sorts these into batches to accompany the correct bouquet but does it at incredibly high volumes with zero errors.”