Flora Cool rooms for

• Increased sales
• Vastly reduced wastage
• Increased vase life of flowers
• Optimum storage and display
  conditions creating customer awareness of a quality product
• Allows bulk buying, giving you
  better prices and more profit
• Flora Cool room lighting creates
  the ‘WOW’ factor
• Reduce staff costs on the day
  by storing wedding & funeral work in advance

Flora Cool is made exclusively by Coldroom Construction Services Ltd, one of the foremost specialists supplying the Florist Trade. Tailor made to suit your needs with workmanship of the highest quality, we can also supply from stock, a large selection of standard cool rooms.

As standard Flora Cool features double-glazed & toughened glass doors and windows, a hard wearing anti-slip floor and digital temperature display.
Full 80mm thickness polyurethane insulation is used throughout the walls and vertical fluorescent lighting adds impact to your presentation. Rooms are easy to maintain, with low running costs, and are installed with the minimum of inconvenience. A variety of extras are available including stainless steel shelving & staging and extra doors and windows. Finance plans from just £22 per week.

MARKET LEADERS in the PRESERVATION and PRESENTATION
of CHILLED CUT FLOWERS

For Florists the traditional method of displaying and selling cut flowers in the UK is not particularly efficient, especially in the summer months or in warmer retail outlets. The flowers wilt rapidly resulting in a large percentage of the blooms being thrown out. Now there is an attractive alternative - Flora Cool temperature controlled storage and display.

Flora Cool rooms offer you a unique and attractive display that cools cut flowers and presents them clearly and elegantly in optimal conditions to your customer.
A really fresh product, presented in this manner encourages your customers. They buy more and repeat business is more likely. Call us on the number below.

Tel: 0151 932 1700

If you're not convinced yet, then read these Flora Cool case studies outlining recent installations:

• Apple Blossom Flower Shop, Armagh, N.I.
• The Design Element, Manchester (Neil Whittaker)
• Hagenblooms at Melbicks Garden Centre, Warwickshire

Warm summer weather can send a florist’s temperature soaring along with the mercury on their thermometers, as flower wastage hits a peak and profits take a knock. Even normally cool shops with traditional stone floors can prove an inhospitable environment for cut flowers - whilst modern units surrounded by other centrally heated shops or sitting in enclosed retail malls are a nightmare. That’s why more and more UK florists are catching up with their counterparts in Europe and the US, where display coolers and walk-in cold rooms are very much the norm for keeping flowers in optimum condition for longer.

The sums spoke for themselves when Margaret Henry made the decision to invest £6,000 in a Floracool display cooler. Margaret, of Apple Blossom Florist in Armagh, Northern Ireland, had been losing between £50 and £60 worth of shop stock a week to the waste bin until she got the cooler cabinet. Now she says, waste is negligible.

“The waste was costing me about £3,000 a year, and on that basis, the cooler will have paid for itself in two years” she says.

Margaret, who already had a closed cold room for storage in the back of the shop, says the problem of short-lived shop displays came to a head after a particularly hot summer a couple of years ago, when wastage levels hit the roof.

Margaret approached specialist firm Coldroom Construction, about their Floracool refrigeration systems specially designed for florists, and says she has been delighted with the cooler she had installed last year.

“It’s especially good for roses and soft filler flowers, which seemed to age frighteningly fast as soon as they went into the shop with the heat and lights”, she says.

“The cooler just holds them back that little bit, but you do have to be very methodical about rotating the stock and having a good clear out every week. I have a flower delivery twice a week so I don’t use the cooler to get away with selling old stock”.

Margaret adds that the cooler also does a great display job with its lighting and staging, which has attracted lots of customer attention.

A point which is echoed by Christine Johnson, a freelance florist, who trades as Flower Zone from her family’s farm premises in rural Dumfries.

Though she doesn’t have a traditional shop premises, Christine sees wedding clients at her workshop and chose a Floracool display cooler “because it looks very professional and shows you take pride in your work”.

An added benefit for Christine has been a saving in staff costs, because she can prepare wedding work days ahead and know that finished pieces will keep in the cooler. In spite of this, she regularly gets reports of bridal bouquets lasting for up to three weeks.

Christine, who has had her Floracool display cooler for 18 months, reckons her flower wastage is now down to a fraction of what it was before. She says those savings, plus the saving on additional staff for peak periods, have probably paid for her cooler already.

Dobbies Garden Centre in Warwickshire have created a stunning display with a 'custom built' Floracool unit.

However, there are still some florists who see coolers as bad for flowers - and in fact, Gaynor Jones used to be one of them. Gaynor, whose shop is in Chester, says: “I was very anti for a long time and used to think that the flowers would collapse as soon as they came out of the cooler - but I’ve had one for nearly 12 months and now I wouldn’t be without it”.

The turnaround came after she spoke to Coldroom Construction and got answers to a lot of her worries and queries.

Finally, she took the plunge last July, and instead of picking a closed coldroom for the back of the shop, she picked a Floracool two-door display cabinet for the front. Gaynor says that not only do the flowers last longer - but customers are noticing it, and rose sales in particular have risen by almost 30%.

“It’s a big feature of the shop, people say it looks fabulous and, given the choice, customers ask for flowers out of the cabinet rather than off the front”.

Roses have also been given a boost at Jill Hancock’s shop, Iced Lilly in Swindon. Jill and her partner Barbara Sharpe have only recently opened their flowers, balloons and cakes emporium, but a Floracool cooler was one of the top priorities in their setting-up budget.

Jill’s son, who’s also involved in the business, reported from his visits to the US that florists over there use them as the norm - and customers expect it.

“We felt in setting up a new business we needed to show we were willing to go that bit further for the customer. It certainly makes a lovely showcase, and my Grand Prix roses have been terrific in there” said Jill.

It was a move of premises that sent wastage soaring for John and Virginia Turner of Acacia Florist in Northwich, Cheshire. They went from a cool shop to one that was surrounded by centrally heated flats and retail premises - and saw wastage shoot up to about 10% of the stock, or a hefty £100 a week.

A huge, Floracool five-door display cooler has solved the problem, taking waste down to less than 1%. Plus, says John, the cooler has “a real wow factor”, which he says has definitely generated more business.

Now John is talking to Bob Buck of Coldroom Construction about the possibility of creating a heated cabinet for plants and exotics, to be located at the family’s other garden centre outlet, The Shrubbery.

Prior to that, Bob had worked with Manchester florist Neil Whittaker to design a cooler like the one Neil had seen on his travels, in Finland.

The attraction for the florist is a unit - either closed cold room or display cabinet type - that can be tailored to their requirements, will be set up and maintained, and can be bought on a payment plan for anything from about £25 a week.

As the case for coolers grows, more and more colleges are ordering them, and floristry students are increasingly including a cooler as a matter of course, in their budgeting plans for starting a business.

Meanwhile, Bob is supplying more and more second and even third coolers to florists who have been won over by their first one.

Neil Whittaker, who bought his huge Floracool shop display cabinet three years ago and added a closed cold store in the back last year, says vase life on roses has gone from 7 days to 14 - and carnations “seem to go on for ever”.

Wedding work can easily be prepared two or three days in advance to save time, and held in the cooler, he adds.

“I really couldn’t do without it now” says Neil.

As something of a pioneer on the cooler front in the UK, he has a couple of useful tips, learnt through trial and error:

• Keep the temperature no lower than 8 degrees C so that flowers carry on maturing slowly rather than being stopped in their tracks.
• In a closed cooler, cover flowers with cello after conditioning and spraying, as this will create their own ‘mini greenhouse’ against the chill factor.

Don't need the display features? Then try our standard cool room.

Standard coolrooms feature an insulated floor with a hard wearing non-slip surface. They offer all the benefits of a Flora Cool room when display is not important. With stainless steel shelving as standard, even the smallest of rooms can hold a large stock of flowers. These rooms are very suitable too for exterior installation where interior space is at a premium. Manufactured & installed with a high standard of workmanship they carry a full twelve month guarantee.

This company is a member of The Guild of Master Craftsmen, an organisation devoted to the promotion of excellence and the engendering of craftsmanship.

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Coldroom Construction Services Limited, 5 Bonnington Avenue, Crosby, Liverpool, L23 7YJ, UK
Telephone: 0151 932 1700 Fax: 0151 932 1800