IN PICTURES: Farm petal business blossoms

How do you turn a hobby into a business that employs 20 people, has seen sales jump 50% in the pit of a recession and is proving popular on the social media website Facebook?

One Shropshire farming family has found the answer growing and drying flowers for natural petal confetti.

View the gallery and read the story of how Shropshire Petals grew a blooming business.

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    Shropshire petals
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Three young women discuss the season’s colours: “Purple is massive this year; fuchsia pink and yellows are also strong; really it’s brights and neutrals…”

The team

We could be eavesdropping a fashion magazine meeting, but these women are discussing confetti not couture and they’re sitting in The Shed, a converted farm building on a 567 ha (1,400-acre) arable farm in Shropshire, not a London office.

The Shed, is the nerve centre of Shropshire Petals, the natural petal company based at Lynn South Farm, near Newport.

The three women are Jess Robertson, in charge of sales, new products and customer services; Katie Plant, the marketing and commercial manager; and Dawn Langham, production manager, also in charge, from July to mid-October, of a largely female crop of 14 Eastern European casual harvest labourers.

Out in the field, Jim Bubb manages the petal business, while his older brother, Jonathan, runs the arable side of the business. Then off-farm Margaret Nickless is in charge of finance and accounts and Emma Small helps with PR.

The business

“We are responsible for at least 15 marriages over our 25 year history”

Since it was formed in 2005, Shropshire Petals has grown year on year. In 2011, sales rocketed 50% and the area devoted to flower cropping has increased from 33ha (82 acres) last year to 61ha (15O acres) this year.

But it remains the family business begun by Jim’s parents, Michael and Rosemary Bubb, more than 25 years ago. They are still actively involved, as is Michael’s mother Daisy who, at 96, still enjoys an evening drive around the delphinium fields.

When he’s manning the SP stand at wedding shows around the country, Michael delights in telling the story of how Shropshire Petals began. “I like chatting to the young ladies and they like meeting the grower,” he says. “They appreciate the story of how we got started and the fact that we are responsible for at least 15 marriages over our 25 year history!” The happy couples, it turns out, have met while working on the farm for the summer harvest season.

Beginnings

The story begins with his mother Daisy drying flowers from her garden over the kitchen Aga to sell at WI markets. As demand for Daisy’s dried flowers grew, driven by the Laura Ashley-inspired fad for florals, her hobby grew into a kitchen industry.

To meet demand, Michael started growing helichrysum, a popular mainstay of dried flower arrangements, delphiniums and wheat on farmland adjoining the garden, and converted farm buildings into drying rooms. His wife Rosemary then sold the dried and dyed flowers and wheat to local retailers and wholesalers.

But then floral fashion moved on and the dried flower business dried up. It was only when Michael and Rosemary were asked about producing petals for confetti that they realised that here was a new – and blossoming – market for their delphiniums.

In the early 1990s, churches and other wedding venues began to ban paper or synthetic confetti. As environmental consciousness grew, so did the demand for natural biodegradable petals.

So, Michael and Rosemary switched to petal production, relaunching JM Bubb and Son as Shropshire Petals in 2005 and building a pick ‘n mix range of nearly 60 petals ranging in colour from a purple black to the palest pink and “icing sugar” white and including delphiniums, roses, rose buds, hydrangeas, cornflowers and lavender. They also sell wheat sheaves for table decorations.

But these days “we just do the walking about,” Michael says. “It’s a young person’s world.”

The process

So the next chapter in the story is now Jim’s responsibility. He is busy out in the fields trialling new varieties and looking at the technicalities of handling the crop. Whilst conventionally drilled and requiring fewer inputs than a cereal crop, weeding, picking and packing by hand is labour intensive work. The stems are harvested in the fields onto trays, brought back to the farm where the petals are machine stripped, dried, sieved and stored.

“It’s very important not to bruise the petals and to remove all the moisture,” Michael explains. “If you bruise them they go brown; leave any moisture and they will disintegrate within three days.”

The exact temperature and air control in the drying room remains something of a closely guarded secret. “Others have tried and failed to dry petals,” Michael says. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

Website and social media

Back in The Shed, “the girls” are bursting with new ideas on how to develop new packaging, new products and new markets.

This spring, all eyes have been on developing a new “fun and interactive” website which went recently went live and reflects the young and natural image of the company. “Six years ago, our website could have been selling spanners,” Michael admits. “There was no fun, no female attraction.”

Now all the mixes have user-friendly names – “Highland Fling” for the Scottish market, “Blush” for the traditional blushing bride, “Black Tie” for tuxedo events. “People buy a mix just because they like the name,” Katie says.

The new website is designed to be easy to use and fun to play with. You can create your own confetti mix; shop for the latest products like The New Shropshire Box, a keepsake box filled with 25 white floral embossed confetti cones; and seek inspiration from pictures sent in by customers.

“It’s all about engaging with customers on a personal level,” Katie says, who regularly blogs about life on the farm, signing off with a jaunty “Love as always SP xx” and answers customer queries on which mixes to choose and when to buy confetti ahead of the big day (delphinium petals keep up to a year so order them in a month or two ahead).

“Facebook is also fantastic for us because we can find out who are audience is and target other 20-40 year olds,” adds Katie. “Everyone of that age group is on Facebook and the feedback we get is great. We may also use Twitter just to get more people talking about us.”

The wedding season should be a flutter with Shropshire Petals…

For more information

Shropshire petals Lynn South Farm, Newport, Shropshire TF10 9BB. 01952 691553 http://www.shropshirepetals.com/

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