Flowers Laurieton NSW: Four Front Desks, One Bridge

Neither of us knew a thing about flowers when we started. Andrew's first ever phone call, a woman fired three quick questions at him and he said it out loud, down the phone, "hang on I will just check with my wife." I was in the back room changing Asha. The blind leading the blind. So the day we finally had money to hire somebody, we did not hire a salesperson. We hired a florist, for exactly that reason, and she is the one talking from here.

The weather station that measured this town shut down in 2021

Anna, qualified florist | ten to fifteen thousand orders taken on the phones out of Pottsville, 2010 to 2013

Station 060022, Elouera Street. It closed in August 2021, and every temperature figure you can find for Laurieton now gets read off an airport fifteen kilometres up the road, on the other side of the ridge. So people blame the heat, because the heat is the only number anyone can see. Laurieton barely gets hot. An average January day tops out around twenty six and a half degrees, which is nothing, and the river keeps the air moving in a way a landlocked town does not. The river mouth has always run its own weather and there has been nobody sitting here recording it for five years.

What finishes a bunch here is the air. Relative humidity through this stretch sits between sixty seven and seventy eight per cent all year, and across January and February it parks at the top of that and stays. Botrytis is grey mould. It wants three things: still air, moisture, and a soft petal to land on. A bouquet wound tight in cellophane hands it all three, because the wrap traps the water the stems are breathing out and holds it against the flower. Roses go first, ranunculus a close second. Brown freckling on the outer petals by the first evening, the whole bloom slumped by the second morning. Nobody reads that as mould. She rings you and says the flowers were old, and you believe her, because how would you know.

Cellophane looks like care. It is mostly the cheapest way to make a bunch look bigger than it is. A woman rang me from Ballarat once, absolutely set on hydrangeas for her mother at Laurieton, because her mother had grown hydrangeas in that garden for forty years. I told her February was the worst month of the year to put a dense head like that on the Pacific Highway and she was not pleased with me. She rang back a fortnight later. The natives were still going and her mother had phoned twice about them. She sends hydrangeas in July now, and she is right to. July is the one stretch when the air here dries out enough for a heavy petal to have a fair go. Wound tight in this town, cellophane is not packaging. It is a greenhouse.

What Happens Between Your Card Details and Bold Street

Our commission gets paid in extra flowers going into the arrangement. It does not come out of the flowers you bought. Nobody in this industry says that out loud, so we will.

* The chalkboard Andrew drew the third or fourth time somebody asked what actually happens after they hit order.

The old way of doing this had a name. Wire flowers. You rang a florist near you, they rang a florist near your person, the two of them did a deal down the phone and everybody took a cut. We know how it worked because for two years we were the shop on the wrong end of it. The bloke we bought the Kingscliff shop from in 2006 had left a Yellow Pages ad running, and that phone would not stop. Taree. Coffs Harbour. Port Macquarie. The whole stretch of coast with Laurieton in the middle of it, twenty-odd calls a day, and we could not fill a single one of them. Honestly, we resented that phone. Then one afternoon in June, with $25 in the till for the entire day, mostly discounted soap, we worked out the phone was the business and the shop was not.

So in 2009 we drove out to a florist west of Murwillumbah and asked if she would take our orders. We would build her a website, she would get every order that came off it, and we would not charge her a cent in fees. All we asked was that she put a few more flowers into the bouquet to cover our commission, and we told her exactly what that commission was. We have told every florist since, and we will tell you, which is the bit up there in the big letters. There is no warehouse on Ocean Drive with your name on a box. Every order that comes off this page goes to the florist covering this town, and she gets all of it. Whoever happens to be cheapest that morning never enters into it. We made that pledge in 2009 and have not moved off it since.

Four Front Desks and a Bridge: Where Laurieton Flowers Actually Land

Two thousand people live in Laurieton. Between them they have two nursing homes, two retirement villages, three funeral businesses, a cemetery and one bridge. Ocean Drive carries the cemetery, the Catholic parish at 421 and Laurieton Lakeside at 349, and it runs the length of the town, so on its own it is not an address here. Which door your order is heading for changes the format, the addressing and the hour it goes out. Pick the one you are sending to.

After You Order

The rest of this is for after you have pressed the button. If you have not, none of it applies to you yet and you can go back up.

Your order goes across to the florist covering the Camden Haven as a paid job with your card message attached, usually inside the hour. From there it is theirs. It gets built in the morning and it goes on the run, and the run is one loop, because that is what a town with one bridge gives you.

If it lands and something looks wrong, ring 1300 360 469 between 7am and 6pm on a weekday, from 10am on a Saturday, or email [email protected] with a photo. Same day if you can manage it. On the day we can do something. Three days later we mostly cannot, and I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Andrew, on the name on the door

The complaints we got off aged care addresses were all the same shape. The flowers arrived, reception took them in, and then they went to the wrong resident, or nowhere at all, because the name on the order was the name the family uses and the name on the door was the one off the birth certificate. Not really anyone's fault. So we changed the order form. It asks for the resident's full legal name now, and separately for whatever the family actually calls her. Reception matches on the first. The card carries the second. It sounds like nothing. It cleared out nearly the whole complaint category.

One more thing, because it comes up. Most people do not ring the sender the same day. They ring their daughter, or they ring no one at all, and they put the flowers on the table and look at them for a week. The Ballarat woman's mother rang twice about hers, and Anna still tells that story because of how rare it is. Silence out of Laurieton is not a verdict. If you want to know it landed, ring us and we will tell you. And by us, I mean us. No boardroom, no marketing team, no call centre reading off a script. Two kids, a dog called Bindi, and most of what this business decides gets decided at our dinner table or in the car on the way to netball. You get one of the two of us.

ABN: 17 830 858 659