31 January 2026

How Limited Choice Helps With Our Sustainability

We’ve been very proud to be recommended in various flower buying guides over the years but there’s something we’ve noticed…

Usually these guides are condensed in to snappy, easy to read summaries – marks out of 10, things they love and things they didn’t love about each retailer. Not always, but every so often we notice that these guides will praise our sustainability credentials but then mark us down on a ‘limited choice’. But those two things are inextricably linked for us – a smaller choice is actually one of many things that helps us be more sustainable. So we thought, hey, let’s talk about it. We love to chat about these things.

Now, don’t misunderstand us, we are always open to feedback but we thought this subject deserved a slightly more nuanced discussion. As our customers will know, during our growing season, our range of flowers increases – our usual Signature bouquets, plus single varieties and now dried flowers too. But our Signature bouquets are our constant – no matter the time of year, you can choose between two designs of Signature bouquets to send. For some, a choice of two might feel limited, but here’s why we do it.

At Petalon, we work to a zero waste policy, meaning every bouquet we make we want to sell, of course, but also that any green waste from our flowers (stems, leaves etc) goes in to our compost bays on our regenerative farm. We introduce a new bouquet to our offering every week which is available for two weeks only before being replaced by a new design. This keeps things interesting for our customers (and us – who wants to make the same bouquet over and over again?!) but it also reduces our likelihood for waste. In order to keep stock fresh, we replenish it throughout the week, whether that’s having fresh imported flowers delivered, or harvesting fresh flowers from our fields. (‘Imported flowers? But is that sustainable?’ we hear you ask. It’s a fair question. In order to offer products and jobs all year round, yes we do import flowers while we’re outside of our growing season, but the efforts we make on our farm to offset this still means we are carbon negative, which you can read more about here.)

Because it’s not possible to import or harvest flowers to order (you could argue the latter is easier but it is highly inefficient), we have to make an educated guess on the amount of each bouquet to make for the coming week. Again, customers may know that occasionally we’ll get that number wrong and so we offer bouquets at a discounted price to ensure they go to a good home. So if you think about it, the more bouquets there are to choose from, the harder it gets to know which will be most and least popular and therefore how many of each to make available. When we’re out of season and importing flowers, we don’t want to be needlessly importing stock to offer pages of choice, just for some of it to end up on the compost bay. But it’s about the customer too – life is overwhelmingly full of choices. When sending a bouquet of flowers, if given the choice of two bouquets there will be one that hits the right note.

Of course, every business is different in how they operate and what works for them, but when we started Petalon we knew we wanted to keep things simple – a choice of two bouquets that changes every week with the seasons, with a focus on doing things as responsibly as we can.

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