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Feature Story
get
the most
from company
meetings
by Amy Bauer
Floral pros at all levels share how shows and training recharge
their batteries.
Floral manager Amy Adams returned from this spring’s Associated
Food Stores, Inc. (AFS) companywide Food Show and immediately
boosted sales at Lee’s Marketplace in Logan, Utah, with new
balloon and rose merchandising and promotion techniques. She
logged a 30 percent sales increase the week she launched a
$6.99-per-dozen special on 40-cm consumer rose bunches available
through one of AFS’s vendors; she displayed the roses massed by
color rather than randomly scattered throughout the department,
as advised at the show.
Those are the types of successes companies hope to see after
they have invested the time, energy and financial resources into
their annual floral gatherings. Part pep rally, part
rejuvenating retreat, part hands-on training and often a buyer’s
marketplace, these meetings take many forms, but all are meant
to inspire the troops and, ultimately, sell more flowers and
plants.
“I try to come back with at least one new thing that I didn’t
know before,” Ms. Adams says. “And that always happens. And also
I try to come back with more of a positive attitude and just
ready to rock the world.”
multiple
formats, same goals
For AFS, the Food Show focuses not only on floral buying but
also on the entire grocery product mix, from center-store to
perishables. Owners and buyers from the company’s 580 member
stores and 23 corporate-owned locations in eight Western states
meet vendors at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake
City, Utah, for three days each April.
To encourage more store owners to bring floral managers to the
show, this year AFS Floral Buyer and Merchandiser Annette Egan
added a half-day floral training session, with the theme “Back
to the Basics.” She saw her attendance more than triple, from
about 20 floral managers last year to 75 this year. And among
vendors, she estimates 17 were represented in floral.
That attendance—among floral managers and vendors—also may have
been boosted by the success of Ms. Egan’s annual fall meeting
geared to floral only, which took place Aug. 15, 2005. “A lot of
them came to that, and they were so pleased that they all wanted
to come back,” she says. That daylong meeting was at the AFS
warehouse in Salt Lake City and let attendees view the entire
process of distributing the floral products.
At Price Chopper, a 115-store chain in six Northeastern states,
a two-day fall show in mid- to late September brings store,
operations and merchandising managers companywide together with
suppliers. The second day features a half-day breakout session
just for floral managers that includes information-sharing and
design and motivational presentations.
In more recent years, Price Chopper has added a daylong
floral-only meeting each January. “We were the first department
at Price Chopper, I believe, to bring everyone together like
that,” says Jon Strom, vice president of floral operations.
January was chosen in order to gear up for Valentine’s Day, and
the meeting takes place at the Price Chopper School of Learning,
one of the company’s original stores in Schenectady, N.Y. This
year’s attendance was about 125, including floral managers and
suppliers.
Val Tisor, senior floral buyer for the Kansas City division of
Associated Wholesale Grocers (AWG), which serves approximately
400 stores in Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, is involved in the
division’s five annual floral meetings: two purchasing events,
or “booking parties,” and three food shows that encompass the
whole-store product mix. She calls the meetings crucial in that
they allow floral managers to check out new products and network
with peers. “It helps them to have a time to plan sales and plan
strategy,” she says.
The booking parties—in October for Valentine’s Day and after
Feb. 14 for Mother’s Day—are at corporate headquarters in Kansas
City, Kan., and consist of a daylong open house. Instruction
beforehand walks participants through sales projections and
suggested product
mixes. For example, AWG’s fresh flower recommendations for
Valentine’s Day were to stock 49 percent roses, 20 percent mixed
bouquets, 15 percent blooming plants, 5 percent arrangements,
and 10 percent balloons and miscellaneous. Between 100 and 110
people, many representing multiple stores, attend each open
house. Food shows are in January, April and August at a Kansas
City convention center, and attendance there among the floral
professionals is usually about 175, Ms. Tisor says.
pumping up floral
At the most recent AFS Food Show, Ms. Egan and the company’s
vendors constructed a replica of a floral department,
eliminating the traditional booth structure and intermingling
vendors’ products to give visitors a real sense of how items
could be merchandise. “At first, I had every vendor mad at me,
because ‘how am I ever going to show them my plants if they’re
all over this department?’ But it actually worked out really
well, and a lot of vendors were very pleased with it,” Ms. Egan
relates.
At the show’s entryway, black carpeting with taped lines
replicated a store parking lot, in which a tent sale was set up
with produce and a greenhouse full of bedding plants. “We had a
hot-dog stand; we had activities for the kids—I was in charge of
a seed-spitting contest,” Ms. Egan says. “We just had all sorts
of activities to show the stores what they could do to create
some interest in their towns.”
encouraging
interaction
Ms. Tisor says AWG keeps the number of floral vendors at its
shows small in order to make the time the most useful for each
of them. At all five AWG shows, just eight to 10 floral vendors
are present. “That increases the opportunity for each vendor to
have a large responsibility and to have increased sales,” she
explains, noting that AWG brings in new vendors for a few
meetings at a time to test them out before they are added to the
company’s core list.
To keep participants talking, Mr. Strom and his team break the
more than 100 attendees at Price Chopper’s January floral
meeting into small groups by the company’s nine zones for part
of the day. They use the time to talk about stores’ Valentine’s
Day sales goals. Kristal Horton, manager of floral merchandising
for Price Chopper, says the company’s three floral specialists
also walk throughout the room during that time, using previously
set goals to help keep the discussions on track.
Mr. Strom stresses the importance of preparation and a fast pace
to maintain interest. “If you lose a group that big, let’s say
at 11 o’clock in the morning, you’ve lost them for the whole
day,” he says.
Carla Underwood, of Pacific Plant Growers, in Lehi, Utah,
represented her company at the AFS Food Show and agrees that
keeping things brief and active are keys to maintaining
interest. For example, she was asked at the training session to
collect odds and ends from around the show and build a floral
display to demonstrate that merchandising can be done on a
budget.
AFS’s Ms. Egan also got store floral managers talking during
training at the Food Show by highlighting in a PowerPoint
presentation the top displays from her Valentine’s Day
merchandising contest. One of the winners, Sandi Probst, floral
supervisor for Lin’s Market in St. George, Utah, says she was
inspired by seeing what other stores put together. “I think
competition is good, and it gives us a little more incentive to
go the extra mile for our customers.” For her first-place win in
her store group, she was awarded a $100 spa gift certificate.
Also receiving a spa prize was Ms. Adams, of Lee’s Marketplace,
who tied with Ms. Probst.
questions
and answers
Ms. Probst says there’s also no substitute for the one-on-one
time she gets with vendors at the shows. “To actually meet the
person who has been the creator of all these wonderful things
that come in, to me that was awesome,” she says. “It really
helps because you can feed off what they have to say, and you
can tell them what you’re looking for, and they love the
feedback.”
Andrew McBride, president of AMA Floral Imports, Inc., who
represents a number of growers at the AFS Food Show, says such
events are golden opportunities for floral managers. “You see a
lot of people, they’ll come in, spend a few minutes in the
floral department, then they run out and go for the free food,”
he says. “They need to come and speak to the vendors. These are
the people you want to ask the questions of. Take the time and
ask those people those questions, and get the answers you’re
looking for.”
Ms. Egan notes that vendors can similarly gain from this
interaction. For example, a vendor who supplied roses to AFS for
Valentine’s Day joined her in February to tour stores and also
attended the Food Show to hear from store-level employees. “He
actually saw the roses from Colombia to Miami, then saw them get
to the warehouse and then saw what happened when they came to
the store,” she says. “It was a good follow-through for him. And
he learned a lot, about our stores, about our challenges and
different things.”
Her added training also allowed floral managers to ask questions
that crop up from day to day, such as why a box of roses would
be dated April 4 if it didn’t reach the store until April 8. Ms.
Egan was then able to explain date-coding and the process by
which boxes are stamped as they leave Colombia. She says others
asked why they couldn’t request certain varieties of roses
without making a special order, and she explained the massive
quantity of roses—500 boxes a week—traveling though the AFS
warehouse doors.
behind the scenes
Months of preparation go into these meetings and shows, which
last at most a few days. Ms. Underwood says Pacific Plant
Growers is constantly on the lookout for products it can tailor
solely to its clients and highlight at such buying shows. “It’s
kind of an all-year process,” she says. “It’s just ongoing.
You’re always out there looking for things for your customers.”
AMA Floral Imports spends months preparing for the AFS Food
Show, Mr. McBride says, working with farms and factories and
getting products from overseas that will be displayed at the
show. “The key is to do some prep, come up with some great
unique products that the stores are going to like and do your
research,” he says. “Listen to what the customers are asking,
and get them what they want.”
For Ms. Tisor, of Associated Wholesale Grocers, the company is
working with vendors and store owners ahead of its booking
parties to establish what products will be available and what
will be on advertisement before the floral managers come to buy.
She says floral training topics for the three food shows are
determined often by simply keeping track of the hot topics in
the industry and what company floral specialists are hearing
from the stores. Similarly, Ms. Egan, of Associated Food Stores,
says she jots down ideas throughout the year as she reads trade
journals and talks to floral managers.
Company-level managers stay in touch with attendees in between
meetings in various ways. Mr. Strom has a weekly e-mail to all
floral managers, and he and the Price Chopper floral specialists
collect e-mailed diaries after each holiday to assess results.
Ms. Egan calls her stores weekly for their orders from her
warehouse and gets feedback in the process, and she also has
monthly conference calls with a rotating group of 10 member
stores.
measuring success
Ms. Adams, the floral manager at the Lee’s Marketplace in Logan,
Utah, says in addition to her rose sales success, she’s been
promoting balloons more—another technique discussed at the AFS
Food Show training—by blowing up a balloon bouquet about three
times a week to leave on display. The tactic was suggested to
more visually show customers a store’s balloon offerings, and
Ms. Adams says she has been pleasantly surprised that all of the
bouquets have sold within a day as customers gravitate toward
these cash-and-carry items.
While AFS’s Ms. Egan didn’t have sales results at presstime, she
anticipated her April show would result in an increase in her
cut flower sales. She says many of her smaller stores shy away
from selling cut flowers because they don’t have floral coolers,
but part of her training was devoted to showing ways to get
around that hurdle. “I think if I didn’t have the show, I’d
still have sales, of course, but I wouldn’t sell the same
things,” she says. “Some things you just have to see to want to
buy.”
Ms. Horton, of Price Chopper, says the best sign she has
received that the company’s efforts were valuable came at its
most recent floral meeting, in January. “One of the managers
came up to me afterward and said, ‘Well, you’ve just made me
want to go right back to my store and put out everything and
sell it,’” she relates. “That really went to the heart of
things— motivating them to feel good about the programs and want
to participate in them and be enthusiastic and convey that to
their customers.”
Yuo can contact Amy Bauer at
abauer@superfloralretailing.com or by phone at
(800) 355-8086.
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