Karin's Florist in Vienna, VA is one of three florists I use personally for my floral gift-giving needs so I've been to the shop plenty of times but for this visit I was checking out new software they installed called Vine Time, employee scheduling software developed by Memorial Florists and Greenhouses in Appleton, WI. More on Vine Time in a moment.  Click here or on any of the photos to access the flower shop tour gallery of Karin's Florist.

I asked SAF's new Director of Member Services, Lisa Sidletsky to come along to check out a well-run floral business in a great location between the affluent northern Virginia cities of Vienna and McLean. Greeting us was Karin's Florist President, Maris Angolia, who've I've known for several years and worked closely with during her years serving on SAF's Technology Committee as member, then chair.

As you may imagine given Maris' tech savvy, Karin's relies heavily on technology to boost productivity. They use the McShan Abner Systems (MAS) floral specific point-of-sale system. The cool thing about Karin's Florist MAS installation is they coupled it with the Televantage IP telephony system to handle incoming calls and manage their call center.

As we sat during out demo session of VineTime with Karin's operations manager Jim Tully, we'd hear incoming messages from the intercom system that droned on . . . "customer online wait time is 8 seconds" and so on until someone picked up the line. As you may imagine as a retailer, you'd never want it saying "wait time three minutes," so staff are quite motivated to take care of the call or risk being slowly tortured by the constant reminder. A bit annoying but very effective!

As mentioned, Vine Time was developed by Memorial Florists as an in-house solution to tackle scheduling. "When I took this task over it took about 6 hours a week and tree's worth of paper.   My goal was to cut that time in half and get rid of the paper trail," says Bob Aykens of Memorial, who is now the current chair for SAF's Technology Committee. "Memorial Florists has cut there labor without laying any employee’s off nearly $80,000 since October 1st and I now only spend 1 to 2 hours a week on schedules."

Check out more about Vine Time here: http://www.vine-solutions.com/

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Society of American Florists' (SAF) newest blog, www.SAFFreshDelivery.com actually soft launched last Monday and was officially announced to the membership this past Wednesday in the latest SAF Ebrief e-newsletter. So my announcement may not be news to some but I wanted to keep fellow association peers not privy to SAF communications in the loop of our Web 2.0 activities.

When you take a look see, you may see a lot of familiarity with SAF's other blog, www.CapitolLettersBlog.com focused on the association's government relations activities. Why? Cause I copied it and retweaked it out. The wonderful thing about the Joomla content management system is that any Web site built upon it is essentially a folder with ties to a separate MySQL database. Everyone agreed the look and feel of CapitolLetters was a winner so we didn't want to reinvent the wheel. It was just a matter of copying the database and folder and renaming them! Much work was done of course to redo the sections and categories but at least it was not from scratch.

In fact, www.SAFFreshDelivery.com, I'm sure, broke all sorts of records (in our minds anyway) in regards to Web site development since I don't recall us even thinking about another blog just a month ago. But I believe with the growing success and feedback from our CapitolLetters blog, it gave us confidence to communicate more with this medium.

So why another flavor of blog? Well our aim was to increase SAF's "touch points" in the floral industry community and reinforce SAF's brand as a valuable, credible source for industry and business intelligence, trends, best business practices, etc. If you've ever worked on a magazine, think of all that ends up on the edit room floor because of space constraints? Our new blog now is now an unrestricted outlet for all of SAF's content creations that may have been edited for space. So hopefully this will expand SAF's online presence with awesome information to help floral businesses.

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Last month, Society of American Florists' (SAF) Board member Chris Drummond of Plaza Florist in Norristown, PA, proposed a road trip you couldn't refuse if you were a baseball fan and a florist (more common than you think). So after the SAF Board meeting last week, Chris, fellow SAF Board member David Boulton of Flowers by George in Arlington, WA and my family trekked to the city of brotherly love to tour a few SAF member Philadelphia-area flower shops and catch the Phillies take on the Nationals (Expos South to me). Click on the pics or links to access the photo galleries of each visit.

But before any shop stops, our first order of business was lunch. And what better way to celebrate my first ever visit to Philly but with a cheesesteak at Dallesandros - click here for a debate on the best steak in Philly, cause I won't go there since this was my first. As I munched, I had an epiphany as to the secret of what makes an authentic Philly steak. As you'll see in the pic, they finely chop the meat. Recall steaks you've had outside of Philly that had meat layered? Exactly. Delicious!

Our first stop was Penny's Flowers in Glenside, PA. Greeting us at the door was Dottie Pannepacker and her husband Bob Pannepacker. Their shop is nestled in a charming village setting (Keswick Village) - awesome for walk-in sales. Despite road resurfacing, Penny's was still busy with customers. A real cool feature was the mini-garden center they have on the sidewalk. Do they pack it away in the evening you ask? Not at all. They promote the honor system to pedestrians wanting to make a purchase after hours by accepting envelopes filled with payment in a slot on the front door. Here's the full photo gallery of Penny's Flowers.

Next up was Kremp Florist in Willow Grove, PA. Much thanks to the Kremp family - Chad, Drew and Scott -- for showing us around even as they were swapping out their computer system and handling customers for Prom night! To sum it up, Kremp Florist is an impressively huge operation featuring a great showroom floor. I was particularly awestruck by their massive warehouse where they store all the party rentals. Here's the full photo gallery of Kremp Florist.

Our final shop tour was Chris' Plaza Florist in Norristown, PA. Although Plaza's address says Norristown, his shop is actually on the border of the city of Audubon, PA. Plaza is ideally located on one of the busiest intersections of the city with ample parking for customers. Plaza is also an impressively large operation housing not only a full service florist open seven days a week but a growing corporate giftware business in the cellar warehouse. Walking through Plaza, you get the feel of a great work flow from the area where packed flowers are processed, designed and finally to where they are finally put on trucks for delivery. Here's the full photo gallery of the Plaza Florist tour.

Once again many thanks to Chris for being a most gracious host scoring David and my family great accommodations in Audubon and awesome Hall of Fame level seats at Citizens Bank Park for the Phillies game. Sorry no pics of the game, we were officially off the clock and enjoying a great evening of baseball – despite the National’s 5-4 defeat. Oh, I’d confirm it was brotherly treatment from Philly fans considering I was proudly wearing a visiting National jersey. Go Expos!

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The Society of American Florists' (SAF) Government Relations (GR) department has caught the blogging bug. Thanks largely to the success of its experimental blog to promote SAF's Congressional Action Days event - still found here: http://blog.congressionalactiondays.com/, GR wanted to retool the blog to highlight the department's everyday activities on the Hill beyond the annual event and support its grassroots efforts. It's been rebranded and repurposed as SAF's Capitol Letters Blog at http://www.capitollettersblog.com.

GR Goes Gen Y

SAF is relying on the Gen Y, new media talents of Brian Gamberini, a proud Tarheel who serves as SAF's government relations coordinator. He'll be the primary administrator of the site, coordinating posts from SAF lobbyists and members. In fact, kudos to Brian for quickly picking up the particulars of the Joomla backend. After the initial setup by SAF's IT department, he's shown tremendous geek potential configuring the modules and functions of the Website. We just may have to recruit him away from GR in the near future.

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