The office of the Flowers & Plants Association is little bit like that scene in the film Jumanji, where the house has been taken over by exotic plants. Flora and fauna occupy every available surface - broad-leafed, no-leafed, trees, grasses: you half-expect to have to ward off an attack from an overgrown mosquito, or perhaps duck as a throng of monkeys swing overhead.
The office is on the first floor of the Covent Garden Flower Market. The corridor outside looks out over the market itself: two steps out of the office, and you’re confronted with an expanse of roses, begonias, tulips, peace lilies and their assorted accessories, all stretching out below, all waiting in darkness for the next day’s trading.
Back in the jungle-like office, and a face appears among the leaves of a broad-leafed something.
This is Andrea Caldecourt, the woman who, since the beginning of July, has been the new chief executive of the Flowers & Plants Association, the body that promotes cut flowers and indoor plants in the UK. With around 230 wholesalers, growers, importers, exporters and retailers all making use of the association’s services, it’s a big job to be taking on.
Caldecourt fell into the job almost by accident. Having worked as communications manager at the association, she then moved on to the marketing departments at Winchester Growers and later, the Redbridge Group. When she was made redundant at the exact time that the association needed maternity cover for its communications manager, it seemed a natural decision to take the job.
“Veronica [Richardson, the previous chief executive] knew she wanted to retire at some point in the next two or three years, and the board of directors felt I was a suitable candidate to take over. I only came in to kind of help out for a month or two, and I think everybody thought, ‘oh, actually, this might be a solution,” she smiles.
Horticulture wasn’t Caldecourt’s first choice of industry. “I wanted to be something creative, so I studied fashion - I thought I wanted to be a costume designer in the movies. I should really be measuring George Clooney’s inside leg at the moment.”
After her fashion and marketing degree at Newcastle Polytechnic, and inspired by her father’s love of gardening, Caldecourt decided on a change of direction. “When I was a child, I would follow my dad around the garden, and one day, he gave me a patch of soil to grow things on. Then, at university, I did a lot of garden design in my spare time for friends, read a lot about plants, and went to visit other people’s gardens.
After graduation, she worked in marketing for three years, after which she decided she wanted to promote something more meaningful. “I thought it would be nice to promote something that I was interested in - and that I didn’t feel I was selling my soul over as well.”
Determined, Caldecourt embarked upon the quest to find her dream job, adopting a rather unusual method to pursue her chosen career. Knowing the sort of job she wanted but not where to find it, she wrote letters to any horticultural contact she could think of, asking them if the job she was looking for existed and if they knew who she could contact for advice.
Veronica Richardson was one of the people who replied, offering her a post as a secretary, which grew to the position of communications manager a few years later. “The job just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” she recalls.
Although Caldecourt is new to her post, her sense of the association as a neutral body, and that her role is to represent all her members - big and small, local and international - pervades her answers to many questions. Does she think that supermarkets are having a negative effect on the industry? “I’m some areas, yes; and in other areas, no. Yes, they’re hugely powerful and they can buy in large quantities, and they can set a price expectation for consumers, which maybe isn’t achievable by companies that aren’t as large as them. But on the other hand, particularly in flowers, they’ve introduced cut flower buying to people who wouldn’t otherwise have set foot in a florists,” she reasons.
Is it important to promote local produce? Again, yes and no. “Some customers are interested in having something that’s grown locally, either to reduce flower miles or to support local industry. Equally, other consumers want year-round variety and choice, or lowest cost product, things that UK growers just can’t supply.”
In fact, Caldecourt is sceptical about the amount of media attention that the ‘ethical’ debate is receiving. “There’s been a lot of talk recently about things like carbon footprints and the general ethical trading environment. Judging by the focus groups that I’ve attended, though, and research that I’ve read, the bulk of consumers aren’t too bothered about where their products come from or whether they’re organic or not.
“Obviously, there’s a small but vocal minority to whom this is an important issue, but the problem is, a lot of that is conflicting. You can reduce flower miles and not import product, but then poorer countries lose hard currency. You can grow organic products, but often, on the whole, you get less return per hectare, and it costs more to grow. So are consumers willing to pay more and have fewer products available?”
Clearly, Caldecourt believes that in an age where some demand perennial and cheap, and others demand local and organic, something’s got to give. “They can’t co-exist. You can’t have year-round availability at low cost, totally organic, with no flower miles attached - in reality, it doesn’t work,” she says.
Having been involved with the association since the start of her career in horticulture, Caldecourt is proud of its achievements. Their current ad campaign, which features the slogan ‘So Simple’ and encourages people to try their hand at flower arranging, has generated impressive results.
“We sent out a viral email - it’s two of the press ads that we placed, and some click-through links that you can open up.
“According to our advertising agency, when people get emails like this, about ten percent open them up - that’s the average response. With us, it was about 30 percent. That was the first achievement.
“The second one was, once you’ve got it open, people will look at the email and maybe delete it or close it down. What they rarely do is click any of the links. But in ours, when they opened it, 75 percent of them were clicking the link to find out more. It was an amazing success.”
Despite this success, the budget for the ‘So Simple’ TV ad campaign, which is due to appear on digital and terrestrial screens in September, was meagre, to say the least - which is mostly down to parts of the industry’s continued apathy towards the association, something that Caldecourt already regrets. “I would like to see additional support from the industry - in all sectors, and in greater depth,” she says.
It is this apathy - or perhaps it’s just ignorance - that Caldecourt wants to change. She sees the association’s main objective as promotion, but for some, she says, the idea of promotion itself needs promoting.
“When I first started, there wasn’t any promotion happening in any kind of depth. Certainly not consumer promotion. Now, companies are starting to understand the value of PR. The association has been going for 22 years but probably the first 10 or 12 years were spent explaining to people why it was necessary to do any marketing or promotion of the product.
“Even now, there are companies who say ‘if my brand logo isn’t on it, I don’t see the point of it’, and there are still a lot of people who don’t fully understand the benefits of promotion, who maybe think, ‘well, the product’s beautiful enough as it is - surely it sells itself?’
“Equally, though, we have members who’ve been with us since the inception of the association, who’ve always supported us and understood the benefits of what we do.”
Sitting in that jungle-like office, on country cottage-type sofas and surrounded by foliage, you certainly get the feeling that despite all the financial challenges that the association will bring, Caldecourt is savouring her new role. It’s a position where she can combine her creative talents, her love of flowers, and even her training in fashion - at last year’s Innocent Village Fete, the association’s stand had enormous queues for people to make flower jewellery, and in September, they are due to promote chrysanthemums as a ‘fashion flower’ at London Fashion Weekend.
I ask her all sorts of questions about her routines, her hobbies, where she lives - but the ones that bring a genuine sparkle to her eyes are the ones about her work. For the autumn, the association is planning a promotion called ‘Naughty by Nature’ that combines food, sex and flowers.
She’s pleased. “It’s a pretty good way to spend a day,” she smiles.
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