advice Archives - The Flower Wall Company

The ugly side of Alibaba

July 8, 2016

We’ve been quite vocal in the past over image theft of our flower walls (and other hard working companies) on Alibaba – and once again we have found Alibaba sellers posting not just our images, but also claiming they are the original creator of that wall, and that any wall purchased will be the same as the one in the photo – our photo.

Getting the images removed is easy enough, but it is like playing whack a mole. We dedicate time almost daily to trawling Alibaba to see if there is any more image theft, but what we cannot do is make sure the sellers aren’t privately sending customers messages making the same claims.

In previous blog posts, we’ve been polite enough not to embarrass Alibaba traders caught in the act, but on this occasion there was such a blatant theft of our images that we wont be doing that. The company who we spent hours dealing with this week had also previously posted our images and other companies on their Instagram and removed them when we called them out on it. But then we found our images were back on their two (and more) Alibaba sites.

So, Guang Zhou Su Kang Ltd aka DY Artificial aka Frank aka Wendy aka about five other companies – (it is VERY easy to become an Alibaba seller, and the ‘ratings’ mean nothing, be warned!) we are not sparing your blushes any more. Stealing images is one thing, but misrepresenting yourselves and us is a completely different ball game. We admit we get angry that our product is being touted by those who have nothing to do with it, except a goal to hit sales targets through blatant deception.

A quick screen grab of their Alibaba sites before they removed all the images with threat of legal action from ourselves shows that they are using all images from other companies hard work, labor and love. A quick chat to them had them tell us they made the walls themselves, a statement we know is a lie.

None of these images belong to the seller, nor are the walls made by them.

This company wasn’t claiming these were ‘inspo’ images, they were outright telling us they were the creators of this wall and had watermarked them to protect them against being stolen!

Image was taken inside our workshop – note the extra images you could also scroll to, including one of a REAL flower wall

Flower Wall created by our sister company Highlife Asia Weddings back in 2014

The two Instagram profiles of the company who also used images from us and other companies to claim the work as their own.

Alibaba is a wholesaler focused on cheap price and materials in a country that has well publicized struggles with intellectual property rights, copyright infringement and honest business dealings. The companies on Alibaba that sell flower walls will never be able to create the same high quality product as us, because our business model is very different. We aren’t a factory with wholesale goals, we are dedicated to high quality floral backdrops made by a small team with a passion for and background in design. We love seeing our walls in use at weddings, events and shows around the world, and everything we create is crafted in our workshop in Shanghai by the same people who you email, speak to, and who write these blogs. We just don’t do cheap or second rate.

The company above in all its guises isn’t a supplier, affiliate or anything of us, and you can see from their own flower walls images they now have to use, the product is completely different.

Not our taste level nor style, and we do not use these low quality flowers

We have never claimed, or aimed to be cheap. We deliver quality and beauty before price. We know expectations, design and styling of the international market because we are an international team and will never sell on Alibaba nor produce the same low quality items that are available on there.

Not only do we work very hard to maintain a professional website with gorgeous designs and flowers that are unique to us, but we actually love what we do, and you can see that in every flower wall we make, and it’s why our high standards and hustle have got us featured and used in magazines around the globe.

We will continue to check Alibaba every day for our and other companies images, and continue to get them removed, but if it saves one more person from being duped into a low quality product, then it’s worth it to us!

www.theflowerwallcompany.com

info@theflowerwallcompany.com

The trouble with red – how to get the best from a rouge flower wall

May 8, 2016

Red – there’s no other color that expresses so much – romance, passion, luck and even anger. No matter your culture, there’s a good chance the color red has an important meaning to special events such as weddings. The beauty of the color red is that in flowers, it comes in many different shades and species meaning the rouge flower wall potential is endless.

We’ve got many different colors of flower walls available on our website, but one color missing, is red. This of course doesn’t mean we can’t create a red hot wall, but as professional flower wall creators, we pride ourselves in being able to advise clients on the wall of their dreams and making it a reality, and red is a tricky color to make shine. Our service and commitment to making the highest quality floral backdrops simply means we prefer to consult with customers looking for a red wall before purchasing.

There are a few important things to consider when deciding on a pure red flower wall, and it’s all about the photography.

A quick google of the trouble photographing red gives a brief glimpse into the issues capturing this gorgeous color. Professional photographers mention issues such as:

Getting details to stand out
The color not rendering properly – sometimes shows up as a pink or even brown
Image appear lifeless, flat and dull
Anything red just appears as a blur or blob of color

This means that your flower wall may consist of many different types and shade of rose, peony, hydrangea and more, but in photo’s it can end up looking extremely difficult to differentiate any detail at all – and it’s a shame when you unable to fully appreciate a floral backdrops beauty in images after the event!

Here’s an example of the issues they’re talking about:

If professional photographers talk about the issues of red, how to contend with having your flower wall photographed by smart phones and digital cameras from your average wedding or event guest? You might have a professional photographer taking some images, but chance are the majority of pictures that will be shared, kept and viewed the most will be taken by guest phones, tablets and digital cameras.

Ways to minimize the trouble with red

Choose a complimentary color to mix with

Sounds obvious, but a red wall mixed with another color certainly makes it more wow to photograph as the block of red is broken up by another shade. We love pinks and purples!

Dior mixing in different shades to their red wall

Consult with an event professional on lighting

Lighting is often overlooked at events and weddings, but it’s so crucial to setting the scene and helping to create beautiful images. Don’t shoot a red wall in direct light, and if you can have angled lighting – consult with your photographer and venue before hand to really make sure your images make the most of your wall.

Even at the recent Met Gala, the red flower wall had hit and miss results. even though it was the same wall being photographed.

Flower Wall Lighting: Bright and better defined vs flat and a slight blur of red color

Mix in foliage

The famous Karl Lagerfeld red rose flower wall was a big inspiration a few years ago when it was debuted, and aside from looking absolutely stunning, the foliage in the wall and larger size of the blooms really helps show detail. Our range of Garden Walls would look absolutely stunning with red blooms and really show them off in pictures.

Red will never go out of style, it’s up there in the most classic and inspiring of colors, so if you’re looking for a red flower wall, speak with us about how it will be used and photographed, and how we can help with the design and choosing of blooms.

www.theflowerwallcompany.com

info@theflowerwallcompany.com

Beware of claims from our so called “suppliers”!

April 19, 2016

Following on from our previous blogs about Alibaba sellers claiming our work as their own, another issue that has also been brought to our attention that instead of posting images of our work to the site, sellers are now simply sending the images and claiming they are the company who makes it, or even worse, the company who supplies our flowers so you will be getting exactly the same product.

We want to make it clear that we do not have any affiliation with any company/factory on Alibaba, and there is not one single business in China outside The Flower Wall Company who knows what we do – what does that mean? The 9 different factories who we work with to create our flowers – bespoke design and colours – do not actually know what we do with the flowers.

Thanks to two wonderful clients bringing this to our attention, we have since contacted the businesses involved in this latest misrepresentation to deal with the situation.

We can stop these businesses publishing our images on websites, but we can’t stop them emailing them out. If you are sent photos that are ours ,and the company claims they are the manufacturer, they are deceiving you and misrepresenting the final product you will receive. Also if you are sent photos that you think *could* be ours, please do let us know and we will be happy to verify, that includes factories claiming they make our flowers…trust us, they don’t!

www.theflowerwallcompany.com

info@theflowerwallcompany.com

The Flower Wall Company: Our Pricing Explained

March 9, 2016

We’re super lucky here at The Flower Wall Company that we have amazing clients and are always busy hand creating floral backdrops, designing new pieces, and custom colouring our own florals to make your event or wedding Pinterest worthy. With over 10,000 hits a month to our website, we generate a lot of interest in our walls from wedding planners, prop hire companies, brides to be, venues, event stylists and even Fortune 500 companies, so we truly are thankful to be busy with orders.

With all this fabulousness going on, we do get a handful of great people from about the world every month mentioning our prices are ‘expensive’ or they can find walls cheaper. We know it can be a daunting prospect, buying something over the internet from China, and on first glance of flower walls on other sites it’s a perfectly reasonable question or statement to make. To help appease those issues, we’ve created this blog The Flower Wall Company: Our Pricing Explained, to give you a better insight in to the product we create, and why we proudly don’t produce a ‘cheap’ flower wall.

With every product and service you buy, there can be a wide range of difference in quality, materials used, price or craftsmanship to name but a few variables, and the same can be said for flower walls! Occasionally we get told by prospective clients that you can buy a flower wall cheaper than ours on Alibaba – no doubt you can buy a flower wall on Alibaba at a cheaper price point, but it wont be our flower wall. In the same way you can spend 1000USD on a car or 100,000USD, no two flower walls as the same, especially when it comes to comparing us to local factories here in China who make flower walls.

Our flowers

We source flowers from multiple places to make sure our walls are unique – our walls can’t be copied as there is not one factory or supplier creating our flowers for us. We like to think of it as like the KFC recipe – it’s not written down altogether for a reason! Only two people know the actual design make up and flower sourcing that goes into our walls, and we want to keep it that way to maintain the high level of design finished product. We also custom design and colour a lot of our own blooms because we were unsatisfied with the mass produced colour and quality of flowers available here. There is a distinct difference in the colour tastes of western and Chinese clients, it’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just different. Understanding what a western clients ultimate flower wall goal is often doesn’t involve yellow tone creams or bright pinks masquerading as blush which is something we see a lot of.

Our designs

Below is a screen shot from an Alibaba store who used an image of one of our flower walls (bottom right hand corner, you can even see our watermark!) to try and sell their own flower wall panels. The main image as you can see has one type of hydrangea, and two types of roses. We don’t use this quality of rose or hydrangea, we know them well and the decision was made a long time ago that they are not suitable for our flower walls, especially the rose as it is polyester and easily warps into unnatural rose shapes. Both this rose and hydrangea are also what we would consider ‘yellow cream’, especially in the heart of the flower, and one of the most common discussions with have with clients during the consultation processes is not to have ‘yellow’ cream flowers. Our belief that is shared by many of our clients is that the yellow cream flowers aren’t elegant or soft enough to compliment other colours typically found in western wedding and event set ups.

We’ve blurred the name of the store on Alibaba to spare their blushes!

Our designs also don’t feature gaps such as you can see in the panel above, on average our flower walls have 110 – 130 flowers per panel and we create them in such a way that the flowers sit nice and snug next to each other, not loose with visible spacing between the pieces. The panel above has less than half of the flower numbers we use, and as well as the roses being different, our standard hydrangea is different to what is used by Alibaba sellers. Also if you’re looking for a super luxe wall, we also have ultra realistic hydrangea with real touch petals which are just gorgeous!

With the Alibaba walls below, we can guarantee our flowers are of a higher quality, will last longer, have a more western colour tone appeal and are more realistic. Peonies are beautiful, but it is tricky here to find simulation peonies that look realistic. The ones used in the Alibaba wall below are mainly a shiny polyester with unnatural yellow and pink tones. In fact we have 10 of the pale pink peonies in our workshop pinned to the notice board as a reminder of what not to use. The placement of the flowers is also important to us, we have a team with experience in floral design and graphic design meaning we think our walls have professional florist look and feel to them. We also use a high quality, durable backing panel that is completely different to the backing material used on Alibaba (own blog post on that coming soon!)

We sell samples of our flower walls so you can compare to the Alibaba pieces to get a better idea of the difference. We know it can be tricky looking at photos, and we are the experts on simulation flowers as day in day out we are working with them, developing new ones and having factories sending us new samples all the time, so are happy to help with your enquiries and questions about the flowers and why on the surface our walls are not the same price point as those on Alibaba.

Our unique value is in our designs and high quality materials, and we know what most people look for when making an investment in a flower wall: the best quality, the best service, and the lowest price. We’ve don’t believe there is a company out there in any industry that can deliver all three, and our company ethos is to guarantee quality and service at the best value. We will never be able to sell our flower walls at Alibaba pricing, simply because we don’t sell Alibaba flower walls, and we hope this blog has started to give a little bit of an insight into how we are different.

If you have any questions about our flower walls, please contact us the usual ways!

www.theflowerwallcompany.com

info@theflowerwallcompany.com

Business as usual!

October 8, 2015

Nihao from Shanghai! We are now back to working normally as the week long national holiday has now ended!

We have been in contact with some amazing customers over the week long break and have some gorgeous flower walls coming up that we can’t wait to share.

www.theflowerwallcompany.com

info@theflowerwallcompany.com

Where to use a flower wall?

June 12, 2015

Where to use a flower wall? Here at The Flower Wall Company, we often get asked how they can be used aside from the most common ways of at the alter or photo booth backdrop. As our backdrops come in easy to connect and construct panels of 40cm by 60cm, the when, where and how become limitless!

The “WOW” factor

Having your flower wall panels connected into one big wall definitely has the wow factor. But where and when can you use such a big instillation? Why not try:

Welcome backdrop for a cocktail reception – have your guests first wedding memory be of a wow entrance
Red carpet backdrop – not having a wedding? Print backdrops for your media walk are so passe, try floral backdrop!
Photobooth backdrop – Popping up at every wedding from here to there, a flower wall backdrop is a fantastic lasting memory for all your guests

Ceremony backdrop – Get married in the presence of an amazing flower wall!

Here’s some alternative ideas of how you can use your flower wall panels, taking the events and weddings you create to the next level!

Head table backdrop – perfect location for all eyes on you

Table runner – Simply place the panel – or cut to size, down the centre of your head table for an amazing table runner

Flower wall, flower wall rental, buy a flower wall, wedding flower wall, flower wall wedding, floral backdrop,

Be inspired by our silk flower wall panels – just like this gorgeous center piece from Stone Blossom

Table skirting – light weight and flexible, our panels can easily clip onto a table to create a luxury table skirt!

Mandap and Chuppah decor – Highlight your mandap or chuppah with easy to put up and connect panels – fix around the edge to take your designs to the next level.

And of course it doesn’t have to stop at weddings and events, your flower wall can be rented out for photo shoots, shop displays and product launches to name but a few ways! Happy planning!