The Great Flower Debate

This post is a little late, but better late than never. Since one of my closest friend moved all away cross country I really wanted to send her something on her birthday. We toyed with the idea of a care package, but before you knew it, time flew by and B's birthday was here and I completely did not have time to shop for anything care package worthy (B if you're reading this...oops).  So we decided maybe we should send a gift basket, however none of the gift baskets I found online look remotely appealing. They all seemed like ones I would send to an office as a thank you, and the ones that were semi-decent did not ship to Canada.   Have I mentioned how much I loath the discrepancy between American and Canadian online shopping!

With the care package and gift basket idea down the drain, I was in search of something really unique to send to B on her first Bday in a new home. First thing that came to my mind was a cookie bouquet, I found this one by the cookievonster.

Photo courtesy of cookievonster

This is one of the most unique cookie bouquet I found online, plus she is a baker located in Vancouver B.C. Too bad she was on vacation!  With the cookie bouquet out the window, we were left with flowers. The most convenient way to do this was to order it from one of those online floral distribution/delivery sites, plus with a cash back from ebates I was pretty much settled on the idea.  All that was left was deciding on a bouquet, after emailing back and forth with C we finally decided to on a bouquet;  I was ready to placed the order but for someone who has never ordered flowers from one of these sites I decided to do a little research.

Suffice to say, I found mixed results, most of the complaints seem to be that the bouquet was a lot smaller than it appeared, or the flowers were not the same one as the ones in the pic, or worst of all there was a slight possibility that the flowers would arrive in a box  and require some assembling even if you selected the in-person delivery option.  Who the hell would want to send flowers that require some assembling?

Not wanting to take a chance that B may possible receive flowers that required some assembling, I decided to google local Vancouver based florist, most sites that I stumbled upon seem to have the exact same pics as those online floral distribution/delivery sites, so I nixed those.  Seriously, even if you as a florist is just part of their network, I would expect to see your some of your work on your site, not carbon copies of pics on those online floral distribution/delivery sites. Then I stumbled on to the Garden Party Flowers,  their site contain all their own creations and best of all had tons of pics of events they had provided to the flowers for. Sold, so I gave them a call and was even more convinced that they were the perfect choice. Not only were  they were super nice and helpful, they even suggested that I should have it delivered in the late afternoon that way I would be able to get the fresh flowers they were planning on receiving that morning.

The bouquet:

 


   

Plus on the bonus side, they actually call to the recipient  to arrange a delivery time, I'm actually kinda of jealous that Montreal doesn't have a Garden Party Flowers of it own.

I would definitely order from Garden Party Flowers again! Thanks again for beautiful creation Garden Party Flower!

Who knew ordering flowers would be so difficult?

♥ Viv