How to save

1. The final checkout screen (the ‘thank you’ screen) has a coupon code for strawberry and floral orders that you place the same day.  Think about your other gift needs:  a birthday or long delayed thank-you gift.. use the code on the final checkout page to send upscale gifts at a discount.
2. Combine your orders with others, your friends co-workers..  (one shipment to a single location) and you’ll save a lot over separate shipments
3. The 2, 4 and 8 dozen gift sets are packaged in one dozen boxes, do the math… we’ll wait.. yep that’s a huge savings (combine with #2)
4. When Possible avoid Saturday delivery, it’s a lot more expensive. (we don’t make money on shipping so if you want to go ahead)
5. The bulk rose shipments are also a great way to save money, just pick up your vases locally and save a ton, if you look around the house you probably already have a vase or two. (combine your rose needs with the other people you work with to get the deepest discount on long stem roses) . Again do the math.. look at the 100 rose package and divide by 8 (that will give you the price for a dozen roses… you’ll see it’s about an eighth of what some florists (local or online) will be selling roses for, that’s a huge savings.
6. Get your orders in early, our suppliers pass the rate increases on to us and there have been crop destroying freezing in Florida (Strawberries and Flowers) and South America (Flowers), they have agreed to honor the current pricing on the orders we have in-house when the rates go up
7. Join our newsletter, it always has the best coupons and discounts.
8. Don’t wait till the last minute, there is a limit to how much we can make and ship in a day, if you wait till the last minute we may be at capacity and not taking any more orders and you may end up shelling out a huge amount for something from someone else at the last minute.

Cheesecake Filled Chocolate Covered Strawberries

We’ll be offering cheesecake stuffed chocolate covered strawberries starting very shortly, the picture above will be the one we’ll be using on the website when everything is in place. .. yes that’s a real strawberry and that’s real cheesecake in the center of the berry. Each berry is stuffed, dipped, and then  rolled in crushed graham crackers to provide a very special experience.

The first question we expect is how’d we get all the cheesecake inside the large long stem strawberries that we use.

• We don’t cut off the tops, the stems remain intact and are never separated from the berries.
• We don’t cut a big hole in the back of the strawberry to remove the core,

Both of the above methods would result in the berry breaking into big messy pieces when someone takes a bite. We’ve developed special tools for removing the core and filling the berry.

1)      Get the delivery address right: you’d be surprised how many people don’t take the simple step of double checking what they entered.

1. Example 1: A package was addressed to an address in Miami that would have been about 5 miles offshore (we caught this one before it happened and corrected it)
2. Example 2: Another problem shipment was the result of some sending the package to “21 Thunder Way” rather than “12 Thunder Way”.  (result= someone else ate her package)
3. Zip codes, a bad zip code will send the package to the wrong part of the state and may result in a several day delay in delivery (result=ruined package).
4. The delivery address is your responsibility, if you get it wrong there is not a lot we can do about it.

2)      Making sure someone is going to be home

1. We had one customer send a package to his mother in Arizona, she was out of town for three days.

3)      Apartments: FedEx/UPS will not always leave a package unattended,

1.  A package left at the door of an apartment may ‘disappear’.
2.  Shipping to a business address or making sure someone will be home is much better.

4)       Shipping at the last possible moment for Christmas (bad idea).

1. Everybody else has the same idea.. and each year FedEx/UPS get more packages then they can handle in a single day (one year FedEx got 12 million packages in one day when they could only handle 9 million)

 Best practices:

1)      Double check your delivery address,

1. Does it have all the needed bits, suite number, business name, correct name
2. “Grandma” is not the correct way to address a package.
3. An incorrect or incomplete delivery address is the leading cause of delivery problems.

2)      Will someone actually be home or are they off on vacation?

3)      When someone is not going to be home: The delivery address needs to be secure  .

1. FedEx/UPS will not leave a package that has a high chance of being stolen.

4)      Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, It’s best when you don’t wait till the last minute to ship. Each of these Holidays are peak times for FedEx/UPS, and the busier things get the more likely things are to go wrong.

1. Christmas: anytime in the two weeks before Christmas works, just avoid the last few shipping days before Christmas. People are much more likely to be home and you’ve avoided the Christmas overload that the carriers experience every year.
2. Mother’s Day: avoid scheduling a delivery for the Friday before Mother’s Day. Mom will just be glad you remembered.
3. Valentine’s Day: You’ll get more ‘points’ for early delivery, everybody in the US is shooting for delivery on Valentine’s, this leads to an overload at the carriers. Having your package delivered a few days earlier will let them be the center of attention.

In the case of our new cheesecake stuffed chocolate covered strawberries there are two sets of handcrafted tools,  crafting and testing of the fillings, taste testing events, reformulations of the fillings for more testing and so one. After the tools and procedures have been finalized then the prototypes are replaced with new stainless steal ones (again all hand crafted). While this was going on we were also doing limited taste tests on other flavors (to be offered seasonally).

 We just finished crafting three of the six of the brand new stainless steel tools, the others will be completed over the weekend.  With everything involved with loading the new products into the website, creating the required product labels, and training the staff, we are looking for a launch date in the next two weeks.