The Decision to Sell Individual Bouquets Paid Off
“I have a Masters in Business Administration, so I have always been pushing for market expansion and risk diversification – a third of our stock would go to Aalsmeer in the Netherlands, the largest flower auction in the world, another third to private exporters and the final third to the local market, specifically targeting the event sector. None of that helped, because when the crisis struck, we were buffeted from all directions. When the price of the flowers in the auction in the Netherlands fell to zero, we stopped the harvest – leaving us with 35 employees, mostly from Thailand and Laos, whose salaries threatened to bankrupt us. Luck was on our side though; because the border crossings into the West Bank were closed, all of my friends in agriculture who grow fruit were left without workers for the big harvests. Within a day, I had brought my workers to farms in the north and south in need of labor and lightened my own load in the process.
“The change began after one of our nephews came to us with an idea: if the shops were closed and resellers were not working – why not start selling our flowers directly in individual bouquets. It sounded strange to begin with, but it worked. He opened an e-commerce site and pushed it hard via Facebook. I put out a message to all my friends who had been furloughed, many of them from the army – anyone who wanted to help and also earn a bit of money was welcome. My amazing family came to our aid, and for the first time, we set up a network of couriers and began to arrange flowers. By Passover, we had managed to sell a respectable amount.
“I was especially proud of the partnership we set up with ‘Veshamarta’, an organisation set up to provide coronavirus support for geriatric institutions. Through them, we distributed 27,000 blue and white bouquets to 310 geriatric institutions around the country. With that said, we are currently undecided as to whether to keep the internet store beyond the current crisis – partly because the results have to prove themselves, and partly because I prefer to remain a grower and not become a wholesaler. We recently returned to activity as a result of demand for flowers for Mother’s Day, which was a couple of weeks ago in the Netherlands. The prices for that were worth it, but nobody can make any promises about what happens next.”