Lifestyle changes and so should we

You can date the emergence of the celebrity culture that dominates today’s media to the 1960s, but back then, alongside the emerging pop stars, it was all about photographers and hair-dressers – Justin de Villeneuve, David Bailey, Vidal Sassoon and Anthony Armstrong Jones were the boys.

Those were the days when the whole lifestyle thing really started.

Before then, the most a suburban girl could aspire to was perhaps a scarf from BIBA, some Mary Quant make-up and the prospect of a ‘good’ marriage complete with terraced house, small car and smelly kids.

Boy, how that has changed. OK and Hello are published in many languages and half the so-called ‘photo-celebrities’ are bit part players who you’ve never heard of, or the wives of obscenely overpaid sportsmen.

The expectations of today’s suburban girl are as broad as her mindset. She holidays abroad and can access the world of fashion and self-indulgence on the web when she can’t find it on her local High Street. What she wants she can get, in theory at least.

So how come we have only seen a small part of this lifestyle shift reflected in the range of flowers that the supermarkets sell?

While the food range now encompasses textures and tastes from more countries than the average school kid could name, some parts of the flower selection really have not changed so much.

Take the humble Chrysanthemum. A stock item that has long been one of the foundations of the offer, and yet with literally hundreds of varieties to choose from, all too often you only see the same range and colours.

Don’t customers get product blind? Isn’t that why retailers move fixtures around – to minimise that risk and engage shoppers with newer products?

Over the last three years we have been trying to re-position Chrysanths – see www.justchrys.com – as more lively and topical. After all, fashions evolve and return in cycles – it’s retro this and retro that a lot of the time – and there is no reason why the same cannot be applied to flowers.

On that basis I hope that we can see some newer and fresher varieties of Chrysanthemums in-store to re-energise that sector and complement, or even replace, some of the usual suspects.