On Monday we announced the exciting news that FW Capital has backed Strelitzia with £175,000. So what’s the back story and what can you expect to be different with the money invested into Strelitzia?
I think the word ‘journey’ is used far too much on Saturday night TV, but let me tell you, developing Strelitzia onto the cloud has been a long journey that has not been easy. The core management team of Katie, Mark and myself are not techies by trade. Mark is a horticulturist and florist owner. And Katie and I grew up in our florist shop. Katie studied journalism before realising she wanted to bend floristry and journalism together, and I studied marketing and held a couple of corporate jobs before heading back into the businesses. My point: at the start of this process we knew about as much about programming on the cloud as the average florist does. That is to say not much at all.
Our tech team have been amazing during the development, the launch and the inevitable tweaking of the new and improved Strelitzia. So why are we looking at bringing money into development now?
Well, we are never finished! We still think there is some tweaking to do on the cloud including new connections on Squarespace and Wix, adding in Eircode lookups in Ireland and the optional extra of a delivery app we’ve been developing (watch out, it is in Beta testing now!). We are also looking for feedback from our existing customers on the cloud-based system. Keep an eye out for our customer satisfaction survey going out via email this week.
In addition, our techies are busy at work creating the new Weddings and Events Strelitzia module. This will be a stand-alone product or an optional extra to your usual Strelitzia system. The module will follow the Wedding and Event journey from initial contact to quotations, to mood boards and organising your workroom. We’re even including stem counts and your drivers delivery route to multiple venues. This will take time to develop but we are looking at a launch this year!
All this development time is not cheap so we are using this investment to give you the users of Strelitzia, the best experience as quickly as we can. If you want to see what Strelitzia can do you for your florists today have a look at our features page or request a free no-obligation demo with Mark.
