Our second phase of the "Where do your flowers come from?" equation is "Shipping". Last week we discussed how our Purchaser Extraodinaire DD Parks scours the globe to get great flowers here everyday. This week we'll talk about our daily pick-up of shipping.

We start every day at Tiger Lily with a stand-up meeting before the shop opens. During the meeting each employee briefly talks about what they have going on that day, customer comments, operating procedures and such. DD tells the drivers where we are to pick-up fresh product that morning; UPS, FED EX, US Air Cargo and/or Delta Air Cargo. They are all located near the airport, which is just 12 minutes from Tiger Lily. It would be easier if we just had the flowers shipped directly to our back door, but then the flowers spend all day riding around in the back a truck before they get to us. With the Charleston heat and potholes, they would suffer more damage from that than their plane ride from Hawaii or Colombia!

DD has flowers sent to particular locations based on shipping speed and cost. DD can get flowers shipped to us a whole day earlier just by using a different carrier. It's a complicated process that she really focuses on, but spending one day less crammed in a box and sitting on a tarmac somewhere means a world of difference in the appearance and vase life of a flower. We feel it's worth it!

The bottom photo is what the drivers see when they pull up. We're at this location so often, they gave us the security gate code and let us pull our van into the warehouse and sign the boxes out ourselves! It may not look like much, but each narrow box holds around 100-150 stems of flowers. Large boxes hold around 250 stems. Multiply this by two or three pick-up locations, and when the driver gets back to the shop around 10am he might have a couple thousand stems! This happens everyday. During the busy season, one cargo van may not hold it all and we'll have to make a second trip. Those are the days when we'll have five or more College of Charleston students processing flowers for eight hours or more.

As you can see in the top photo, the boxes are packed meticulously. All the care the grower takes in planting, nurturing and harvesting the stems are worthless if they are just stuffed in a box to be bruised and broken. It's all manual labor, and you can tell the pride and quality of a grower just by the way the stems are packed.

Getting great flowers in is critical to our success at Tiger Lily. I equate it with a chef trying to cook a gourmet meal. It's a lot easier if he can get artisan breads, cheeses, meats and other ingredients from specialized vendors than just picking up some ground beef and hamburger helper at The Piggly Wiggly. That's why we spend the extra time and effort with getting great flowers to us a quickly as possible.

Next Post: Processing, The Devil's in the Details!