Shipping schedule & handling costs

Shipping schedule

Plants are living organisms and we ship them at the right planting time. Seasonally, there are two big groups:

1. spring flowering bulbs, like tulips or daffodils, that are planted in autumn and bloom in spring (we ship them between October and December);

2. summer flowering bulbs, like dahlias or nerines, have different shipping times for each collection (we ship these between March and May).

For Amaryllis, Peonies and Lilies we have slightly different shipment times. Bellow you find a table of pre-order vs shipping time:

J

F

M

A

M

J

A

S

O

N

D

Summer bulbs (e.g. dahlias)

🏷️

📦

Spring bulbs (e.g. tulips)

🏷️

📦

Lilies

🏷️

📦

Peonies

📦

🏷️

📦

Amaryllis

📦

🏷️

📦

Gifts & other

📦

🏷️ Pre-order time, you can already order your flower bulbs, but it is not planting time yet

📦 Delivery time, it is finally planting time, so we start shipping your flower bulbs (including all the pre-orders)

Notes:

Anything ordered before each shipping time is a pre-order, this means you will get your order at the beginning of the shipping season only (e.g. for tulips this is October).
In case of a combined pre-order (e.g. tulips + peonies), with two different shipping times (e.g. tulips in October and peonies in November), we will charge double delivery costs.
We ship all our plant material at the best planting time. In case you live further North or further South in Europe and need your flower bulbs later or earlier in the season, please email us and we shall see what we can do.
We can also combine orders with two different shipping times into one shipment, however we do not recommend this, as one plant category may arrive too late for the planting season.

Handling costs

Fluwel only supplies flower bulbs within the European Union and United Kingdom. Below you will find the handling costs for each country:

Country	Shipping costs
Austria	€ 16,50
Belgium	€ 8,95
Bulgaria	€ 52,75
Czech Republic	€ 19,50
Croatia	€ 40,00
Cyprus	€ 47,50
Denmark	€ 20,00
Germany	€ 9,95
Estonia	€ 45,00
Finland	€ 35,00
France	€ 19,50
Greece	€ 45,00
Hungary	€ 23,50
Ireland	€ 33,25
Italy	€ 23,75
Latvia	€ 45,00
Lithuania	€ 45,00
Luxemburg	€ 17,50
Malta	€ 45,00
Netherlands	€ 8,95
Poland	€ 23,50
Portugal	€ 30,25
Romania	€ 40,00
Slovakia	€ 23,50
Slovenia	€ 34,50
Spain (no Canary Islands)	€ 25,00
Sweden	€ 19,75
U.K.	€ 29,95

No free shipping

Every so often we have a conversation about the shipping cost; do we charge them or do we offer free shipping. After much deliberation, we decided not to offer free shipping and here is why: Fluwel ships to all countries in the EU and UK and every single country has its own shipping costs. It would not be that difficult to just increase all our bulb prices with 15 % (this is about the average cost of shipping) and then say: Free Shipping. But the unfair part of this set up is that by doing this a country like Germany, where the costs of shipping are low, shares for a big part in the costs of shipping to a country like Ireland where the shipping costs are 5 x higher. This does not feel right to us. So, for the moment we choose to keep our bulb prices low and to charge for the shipping proportionaly, the same way we are charged for the first 20 kg of every shipment. If you purchase more than 20 kg we will cover the extra costs of shipping.

Of course, we dream that in the future the EU will have a postal service like in the US where we just have to deal with 1 or 2 rates for all of Europe.