7 May 2021
Meet The Team
Since our move to Cornwall and the changes the business has been through, our team has grown quite a lot in the last year, with new job roles emerging as the farm in Cornwall takes shape and new ways of working emerging as times change in a world with Covid-19. We thought we’d take a moment to introduce you to the Petalon team and everyone who’s involved in making the business what it is.
Our founder Florence and her husband James need no introduction. The move to Cornwall last year was partly a personal decision for their family but also brought with it the exciting opportunity to start growing flowers. Florence still designs the weekly bouquets and oversees all creative decisions as well as deciding what we’re going to grow and getting her hands dirty in the flower field! James, as well as managing the commercial and financial side of the business has been responsible for the tremendous amount of work done on the farm (and any other place we’ve worked) to make it a liveable and workable space. He is also no stranger to (and an enormous fan of) getting his hands dirty. Becki is the next longest standing member of the team and was made Director along with James and Florence earlier this year, overseeing business operations and growth and anything else that requires managing a project on a Trello board. She started with the business in London in 2016 but is now based in Anglesey. Her hands are slightly cleaner.
If you ever need to get in touch with us, you’ll be answered by one of our lovely and incredibly helpful members of our Customer Service team, Billie, Nikk or Amy. Our Customer Service team all work remotely, from Wales, to Suffolk, to Devon and all manage their part-time hours for Petalon around their own small businesses and studies. Billie has an 8 month old and her own floristry business which she manages alongside her hours with Petalon and Nikk also runs her own horticulture business, designing and maintaining gardens. Amy, also a nature-lover as well as a keen hiker, is preparing for a Masters at Oxford in English Literature.
Our studio team in Cornwall are responsible for processing our orders – this means managing the flowers we have delivered and preparing them for the florists, wrapping and boxing up our bouquets and generally making sure the studio is an organised, tidy and lovely place to work. The team are in constant communication with the Customer Service team who work together to manage a smooth process between any customer feedback, such as amendments to orders, and the bouquets that leave the studio each day. Alice, Sophie, Charlotte, Kayleigh, Eve and Bea all work hard to make sure the bouquets that leave our studio meet the highest standards as well as generally mucking in on anything that needs doing on-site – they’re no stranger to the flower field!
Our florists create the bouquets that Florence designs and photographs for the website each week. It’s no easy thing being a Petalon florist – our bouquets are flat-backed so they sit in our postal boxes, so it’s a different shape to what some florists are used to, not to mention making hundreds of bouquets a day and ensuring they all resemble the photograph on the site. As we prioritise minimising wastage, we only order what we need to make a certain number of bouquets each week and this means each bouquet follows a specific design plan to make sure each one includes the same flowers as the last and nothing is leftover. Jen, Hannah, Liv and Juliette work for Petalon alongside their own businesses and interests, with backgrounds in floral design, interior design and teaching. It’s a real learn-as-you go environment and as such, our studio assistants Alice, Sophie, Kayleigh and Charlotte all work some shifts throughout the week as florists too. At busy times like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day our studio team really go above and beyond, working long shifts and making up to 5 times more bouquets than a normal day.
Clare from Hendra Farm Flowers is an enormous help to us, providing her time and wisdom one day a week to help us with our planting schedule and anything else you might want to know about setting up and running a flower farm. To help with the manual work in the fields – planting, sowing, cutting flowers for our Field Flowers – we have Emily and Meg. Emily spends a lot of her spare time in water or walking Cornish coastal paths with her dog. Meg grows veg on her own farm, One Field Farm and fits both of her jobs around her 6 month old.
The majority of our team work part time, with all sorts of varied interests and careers making up the rest of their time, which we find is the perfect recipe for an interesting team of people to work with! We have people from all walks of life but all with a common appreciation for flowers and nature. It takes a whole team to keep Petalon going and we couldn’t do it without them!
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