“Simply Good and Friendly Pricing”
As you look around in our web shop, you might find that our flower bulbs are offered slightly differently than the ones you find in other online stores. Especially people who are experienced shoppers for all things meant for gardening might find it unusual that our flower bulbs are offered in larger numbers than what is average. Oftentimes, flower bulbs are sold in sets of 10 bulbs, sometimes even less. But at Fluwel, we choose to work with larger quantities. There are two main reasons for this.
Let’s use the Tulip as an example for the first reason. When you plant a group of ten Tulips in your garden or somewhere in a flowerpot, you might find the result slightly underwhelming when they are in full bloom. Obviously, ten flowers isn’t nothing, but our opinion is that when you plant twenty bulbs, the flowers are way more of an eye-catcher, and the variety of Tulips you very carefully selected gets much more opportunity to reach her full potential.
The second reason is that doubling the content of one bag reduces the price per bulb, allowing us to sell them to you at a lower price point. Most of the cost of the flower bulbs you order online doesn’t come from the bulb itself, but from the work and packaging required to safely send them your way. If we can split the cost of all of that between twenty bulbs instead of ten, then logically the price per bulb goes down. To give you an example to make this a little bit more concrete: If we take a look at Tulip Queen of Night, you see that you can order twenty of those in our web shop for €9,50. Convert that number to a single bulb, you get 47,5 eurocents per bulb. When you buy Queen of Night in another web shop, around €6,- per 10 flower bulbs is about average. Then, the price per bulb would be around 60 eurocents per bulb, which is 20% more expensive than our flower bulbs are.
Another thing we have been mindful of since we just started out are the photographs you see on our website. We only show photographs we have taken ourselves. To take your own photos, you obviously need to see the flowers for yourself, and if you want to take several photos to show a flower over the entire period of time it is in bloom, the easiest thing to do is to plant them for yourself. And planting all of the varieties we sell for ourselves is another one of the things we are very much devoted to. It is very important to us that we can actually talk to you about our own experience with every single variety. That is why we have our own Trial Garden next to our warehouse on the Belkmerweg. Every year, we plant every single variety we offer in our web shop in this Trial Garden. If we want to start selling a new variety, it needs to spend a season in this garden, first—then, we can also take our own photos while she shows us what she is capable of. The root of this practice is that we want to see every bulb and tuber with our own eyes before we truly believe in them.
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll also know that we always try to send you the biggest bulb sizes available every season. You may have heard it before, but a larger bulb means a larger flower of better quality. As they are a live product, the bulbs aren’t the same every year, but in the blog, you can read all about Carlos visiting all the different grower who supply all of the bulbs and tubers we sell in our web shop. He always writes his updates in the newsletter, so our readers know exactly what kind of season we have had and what to expect of this year’s flower harvests. Everything we sell comes directly from the growers, except for the Daffodils: those are grown by Carlos himself, and he is very proud of the positive reactions people send in every year. The pictures and emails of beautiful gardens and flowerpots we get from our loyal customers are very dear to us, and we thank everyone who has ever taken the time to show us their gardening successes.
Another thing about the Trial Garden is that besides seeing potential new varieties and taking pictures of our assortment, we can also use it to check if every flower bulb is the variety it is supposed to be. No one can tell what a flower is going to look like from the flower bulb alone, and a little mistake sometimes is only human, so it is always good to check if everything grows into what it is supposed to be. The Trial Garden is located at Belkmerweg 20a, next to the warehouse. When the flowers are in bloom, it is free for everyone to come over and have a look at our varieties. And in the Spring, there is also a pick-your-own-Tulips shop, where you can gather your own bouquet and take photos in the flower field. Further down the road, we also have our Dahlia, Lily, and Peony Trials, and if you have a look at them, you can also see our solar panels and windmill. We are committed to using our own sustainable green energy, and we would love to show you what that looks like if you are ever in the neighbourhood.
We hope to either welcome you or see you again as a Fluwel customer, and we really hope we can impress you with our “Fluwel Quality”.
Fluwel: Flowers Love U, We Enjoy Life
Kind regards,
Team Fluwel
