A brief history of Petalon
Petalon was born in East London and founded by Florence Kennedy in 2014, shortly after her husband James began his bicycle manufacturing business. When James needed to send a bunch of flowers one day, they both realised there wasn’t much choice if you wanted to send something beautiful and original for a reasonable price. Surrounded by James’s bicycles, Florence and James began to form an idea for a better kind of flower delivery. Petalon was born, with the aim of offering beautiful yet affordable flowers, in a more conscious way.
In the early days, it was just Florence and her bike, heading to the market at 4am to select flowers, then heading home to arrange the bouquets, write out people’s messages and then hand deliver her creations across London. We kept wastage low by offering a choice of two signature bouquets that changed every week, which we still do to this day, as well as our seasonal, homegrown Field Flowers. As word of mouth grew, so did our delivery area and our team. Petalon was featured by Vogue, Vanity Fair, Time Out and the Evening Standard to name just a few. We started doing weddings and workshops and Florence was invited to write her own floristry book, Flowers Every Day, published with Pavilion. With a book and a baby on the way, a more formal business structure was needed and Becki joined the team in 2016 as Head of Operations and later became a Director in 2021. James took over the commercial stuff and we hired dedicated florists and cyclists.
In 2018 we extended our service from 5 days a week to 7 days a week and launched our nationwide service, offering the same Petalon bouquets on a next-day service to the rest of the country using a carbon-neutral courier. We were delighted to see our bouquets popping up all over Britain and we continued to deliver to 50 postcodes across London by bicycle, as well as to the rest of the country, all from our studio in East London.
In 2020, James and Florence made the decision to move their family out of London and to Cornwall. Petalon has always been a family-run business and although we would have loved to have kept our London studio it just wasn’t possible during the pandemic. So Petalon moved to Cornwall too, which meant leaving London and our bicycle delivery behind. However, in turn, we gained the space and the resources to be able to grow our own flowers and make British flowers more accessible, wherever you live. We now have several polytunnels, many kilometers of outdoors beds and a budding flower farm of our own. This means we can now offer customers the opportunity to buy our highly seasonal Field Flowers, cut straight from our farm in Cornwall and delivered to homes across Britain the next day.
If you’d like to keep up to date with Petalon you can sign up to our newsletter below. Every Thursday we brighten people’s inboxes with our bouquets for that week and every Monday we let you know about other goings on at Petalon – from what’s going on on the farm, to news, recommendations and things we love.
