Florists for Change – Letter to Vendors

Florists for Change’s Atlanta meeting will focus heavily on inviting vendors to present their solutions. Floranext will present our florist POS and florist website solution.

Here is the invitation letter from the FFC team to vendors.

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We are in Atlanta and covering the Florists for Change event. Here was the agenda for the day!

Dear Floral Industry Service Provider:
As you likely know, Florists for Change (“FFC”) is a new organization whose principal purpose is to improve the industry for the traditional retail florist (“TRF”). We, the four founding trustees of FFC, will seek strategic relationships with a variety of floral industry service providers and suppliers (“FIS”) whom FFC may elect to designate Associate Members, based upon a set of requirements and uniformly applied selection criteria established solely by we trustees and authorized officers of FFC. Associate Membership in FFC will confer certain responsibilities, obligations, and benefits to the FIS, as established and modified from time to time by FFC.

Should your company wish to apply for Associate Membership in FFC in the future, and should you wish to engage the florist attendees of the upcoming FFC meeting in Atlanta on October 03, 2011, we encourage you to respond to this letter immediately, clearly stating the reasons your company should be designated an Associate Member of FFC, explaining how its involvement will be of benefit to FFC, providing a detailed outline of your presentation, in which you explain how you will meet and adhere to the responsibilities and obligations of Associate Membership described below. Your presentation will be of 10 minutes maximum duration, followed by 5-minutes maximum for questions from the floor.

We trustees will carefully review your response and outline to determine whether it would be appropriate for you to make such a presentation at this meeting. A limited number of FIS guests will be invited to speak, and those will have demonstrated their clear intent of supporting and advancing the goals of FFC.

Responsibilities and Obligations of Associate Membership
An Associate Member (“AM”) of FFC must publicly state in writing its endorsement and support of FFC with an explicit pledge to assist FFC in achieving its Mission:
Florists for Change is dedicated to improving the economics of the retail florist by encouraging industry advertising, providing exceptional consumer value, and promoting equitable trading among florists.

This endorsement must also explicitly support FFC’s Code of Ethics. On a practical level, this means that an AM must pledge the following:
1. To not knowingly conduct or support business entities who conduct deceptive (consumer) advertising in the floral industry for the purpose of order aggregation.
a. In this context, a deceptive advertiser is one which purposefully misrepresents itself as a local florist in given market when in fact it is not, or which purposefully utilizes the name of one or more established local florists to willfully confuse and thereby deceive consumers in believing that it is the entity misrepresented, when in fact it is not.

2. To conduct its business operations through the prism of the “Golden Rule”, focusing on high ethical standards of fair trading, providing the highest possible value for its customers, and promoting an unconditional, unequivocal, unlimited, no-hassle 100% satisfaction guarantee to its customers, any of whom might be TRFs, other AMs, or end-consumers.

3. For so long as an FIS is an AM of FFC, it must contribute to FFC an agreed-upon percentage of sales of its goods and services to FFC members for the specific purpose of funding a multi-year, pervasive, non-brand specific “Buy Local Flowers” advertising campaign. Said campaign(s) will be developed and managed solely by FFC with the intention of use in the North American market. AMs must account for said sales and periodically present the same to FFC, and agree to periodic audits of said accounting upon 30-days prior written demand by FFC.

Benefits of Associate Membership
By virtue of your Associate Membership in FFC, you overtly demonstrate to the floral community:
1. your concern for the welfare of floral consumers, the industry, and traditional retail florists, and your recognition that we are all operate symbiotically in this business,

2. your agreement that positive changes for improvements in this industry are overdue, most particularly, general category advertising compelling consumers to buy flowers from local florists,

3. your confirmation that your business is profoundly and refreshingly different than from the deceptive advertisers that hurt consumers and TRFs.

FFC will publicly endorse products and services of AMs to its general membership and potential members as a benefit of general membership, and will individually feature its AMs in printed and electronic communications with general members of FFC.

For a nominal charge, FFC will provide a list of AMs on a page on the FFC website, and each AM will be represented by a business-card sized link to the AM’s website, and FFC will provide AMs qualified periodic lists of FFC general members who have opted to receive marketing materials from FFC and its AMs. Said charges will be directly applied to the FFC advertising fund.

By helping FFC, you help your own business. Together, we truly can bring the goals of FFC to fruition. We urge you to get on board for the good of our great industry. If not now, when? If not you, who? After all, we ARE Florists for Change!

Thank you for your kind consideration.

Sincerely,

Betsy Hall – Hall’s Flower Shop and Garden Center, Stone Mountain GA
Keith Hill – Beaverton Florists, Beaverton, OR
Dirk Lorenz – Fremont Flowers, Fremont, CA
Mike Fiannaca – Sparks Florist, Reno and Sparks, NV