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They might call themselves A Better Florist, but are they? Better florists I mean. This flower company reached out to me late November 2017 asking me to write a review (I’m touched, but still unsure why) in exchange for a bouquet.
Before I made a decision, I did my fair share of research. Found a buttload of articles as to how they fucked up Valentine’s Day orders, how there was massive drama after one of the key managers left (he wrote an expose blog post) and how they ripped off pictures from another website.
Hm.
On top of all that, I didn’t want to do a review in exchange for goods in kind. I am paid to write man, I’m not some desperate influenza who lives on freebies. The email exchange also stipulated that my blog post MUST include the website link in the first line of my blog post. As I told the marketing manager. No. I’m not comfortable with that and it’s my choice to put what I want, where I want in a free blog post.
Let’s get this straight once and for all ‘kay: if you decided to send a content creator a freebie, it should be up to them whether they review it or not. And if they do it should be on their own terms. If a content creator REACHED OUT to you for the freebie then they SHOULD compensate you with some form of publicity. Also, in a situation like that, it’s up to the brand to decide if they want to give the freebie!
So after reading the reviews, I decided to go ahead with my own review because I hoped that the company was on the mend and this was part of a new publicity campaign. I wanted to give them a chance you know? Also, it was Christmas and I thought it’d make a nice centerpiece.
I also decided to pay no mind to the old reviews and avoid going all “Mythbuster” on them. So I agreed to do a fair, objective review, but said that I’d put the link to A Better Florist wherever the hell I wanted. (I said it in a much more professional tone of course.)
TL;DR? The review starts here:
(All photos unedited)
After digging around on their website, I found The Madelene:
The website’s caption: “Packed full of sunflowers, snapdragons, daisies, bright pink roses, rosemary and more, The Madelene is one wild bunch that will get everyone groovin’ into summer. Blooms will arrive with glass vase pictured.”
Gorgeous bunch! I was sufficiently impressed. The photos looked professionally taken and the variety of bouquets more than adequate. Affordable for the snapdragons and other unique blooms, and oh-so-colourful! It even came with a classy, complimentary vase. Delivery was free too. (According to the FAQ, the flowers came from their own farm in Cameron Highlands.) My bunch, $78 was an average-priced one, so you can expected bouquets upwards from $60++. The most expensive one I saw was a $119 bouquet of tulips and others.
I requested that they send it on Christmas Eve, the day of my family’s Christmas party, and to have it delivered before 12pm. According to the manager, their usual timeslot was between 9am to 12pm.
Perfect!
But….
The flowers came at 2pm. (they had 4 hours to deliver them!)
The flower arrangement was vastly different from the website. There were different flowers than what was actually described in the website. They were also all clumped together according to type rather than being properly arranged for a vase or bouquet. The poor sunflowers had NO sun cause they were buried under other flowers.
There was a crack in the plastic vase (which was supposed to be glass as mentioned on the website)
The water in the vase was cloudy and grimy.
The card was tied onto the vase with a limp piece of string and it simply dangled.
The card said that was supposed to be a packet of flower food, but there wasn’t any.
The card said that was supposed to be a packet of flower food, but there wasn’t any.
A number of the flowers were broken, wilting, with the bottoms of the stalks uncut. This is just three of them.
Honestly, they looked much worse in person, tired and sad, clearly not well-taken care of. I don’t know if it was the delivery team, but it just felt as though everything was thrown together in a rush. No effort was put into the bouquet, which made me feel terrible cause the flowers, some you hardly see in regular bouquets, definitely deserved more love!
Also, the flowers were arranged to face forward, so if you spun the bouquet around, all you’d get was leafy greens pushed together in a fan. I wanted a bouquet that I could turn into a table centerpiece (especially since it can in a glass plastic vase), but it only worked in ONE direction.
My husband said, “what did you expect.”
After my amazing dinner party, my cousin-in-law and I decided to rework the flowers. Pick out the grimy bits and give it a new lease on life:
We laid out all the flowers, found that the flowers weren’t trimmed properly – they had all the rotting greens clumped to the bottom.
So we picked out the sad bits, trimmed the stalks,
And rearranged everything to give the sunflowers some breathing room and make it more rounded.
We ended with this:
It’s not perfect, but I was happy with it! It felt more… whole. But man, I was pissed at the flower shop. I mean, how can you send in some half-past-six job to someone you’d want to review your product????
I wrote to A Better Florist to give them a heads up. Also asked if they still wanted me to write a review because if I did, I would be honest.
To their credit. They still said yes. They also said (without me asking) that they’d send in a new bouquet.Personally, I felt it was pointless, cause the event was already over, the people I wanted to present the flowers to weren’t going to see the new bunch so… there was really no need for a new bunch. The bad impression had already been made.
Also, I didn’t appreciate how they said that “It is our first time to encounter this situation and we didn’t expect this to happen.” That’s an outright lie though right? I mean it has happened many times before. It’s littered all over the internet.
But again, to their credit, I appreciated that they apologised, they seemed sincere in their apology and in that they would reach out to their team of florists to fix the problem. They also quickly sent a new bouquet, which now dress my parents’ home.
The bouquet was a ray of sunshine. Sure, it still had that odd “only usuable in one direction”, but this time the flowers were brighter, looked more lively and the card was fixed. It still DID NOT come with plant food, it still came in a plastic vase and the water was a tad murky, it still was different from the website but…. I really could not be arsed to make a mountain out of a molehill. The flowers achieved what they had to achieve, which was to look pretty on a tabletop.
Would I recommend ordering from them again?
Not for special occasions like Valentine’s Day or Christmas, but maybe for an occasional bouquet you’d like to brighten your home or to surprise your girlfriend with. Maybe getting them for an off-peak hour thing might work. The flowers are unique in their own way and definitely a talking point haha.
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