Mother's Day flowers may not arrive as florists run out of delivery slots
Mother’s around the country could be sitting at home this Sunday waiting for flowers which will never arrive as offspring who have left it late may have found they are out of luck.
For a huge boom in orders at florists has left them overwhelmed with some finding themselves short of delivery slots. One even tweeted on Friday to say it had run out of fresh flowers.
A spokesman for the British Florist Association (BFA) and some companies said lockdown had driven demand for delivery with families separated and unable to see each other.
Bloom and Wild, which specialises in flowers that can be posted through the letterbox, said its Mother’s Day sales had doubled compared to last year, while online card company Moonpig said this year has been its busiest ever Mothering Sunday.
The spokesman for the BFA said: “Florists are mostly small retail businesses on the high street or in a studio, and their capacity to fulfil thousands of orders isn’t possible.
“Once they have reached a few hundred deliveries for Saturday and Sunday, they can’t afford any more drivers and they want to get the flowers there first thing in the morning, not at 5pm.”
She added that families being separated over lockdown had boosted demand. “Florists have had a pretty tough time like everybody, but they have been extremely adaptable to social distancing and click and collect,” she said.
Interflora, one of the country’s best-known florists, had run out of delivery slots in some areas of the country on Friday.
A spokesman said that while the company did have availability it can differ depending on location.
“We have over 900 local independent florists across the UK and Ireland who all have individual capacity limits based on demand for their local area,” she said.
“The availability shown on our website moves in line with their capacity, and this can change from day to day leading up to a big event like Mother’s Day.”
She added: “Demand is high, of course, due to lockdown and we’ve also seen orders come in much earlier than in previous years.”
Aron Gelbard, chief executive of Bloom and Wild, said: “We’ve seen an increasing trend throughout the pandemic of people sending flowers as a way to send some love in the post whilst we're all apart, and we are really fortunate to be able to still make that happen for our customers.
“And this is definitely part of a broader trend that goes beyond Mother's Day - so far this year, as many people have sent flowers with us as the whole of 2019.”
Meanwhile, online card companies said they had also seen a surge in customers adding gifts or flowers to their orders because they are separated by lockdown.
Moonpig said sales of beauty gifts are up by 198 per cent year on year, with gifts for the home soaring by a massive 582 per cent.
A spokesman said: “This year’s Mother’s Day will be the biggest we’ve ever seen, as people are physically separated from their loved ones during the lockdown.
“Tulips are proving extremely popular this year, and we expect to deliver almost two million stems to mothers across the country. If you lined up all of those tulips stem to stem, you would get all the way to the Netherlands and back.”
Andy Pearce, chief executive of Thortful, another card company, said it is selling flowers for the first time this year.
He added: “We have had our best ever Mother's day, enabling us to donate 5p on every card and £5 on every bouquet to NHS Charities Together and we've raised £117,000 so far.”
