Brexit and Lazy Flora

Dear Lazy Flora friends,

You will no doubt be hearing more than you want to about Brexit in the news, and the time is right for me to drop in and share with you a few insights on how it will affect Lazy Flora.

Most importantly, I want you to know we are working to ensure that any changes or challenges to our business caused by Brexit will be completely invisible to you.

That’s the plan.

However, I do want to acknowledge the many challenges that Brexit presents, because they are more than a mild disruption to a small business like ours, and at this moment in time, there just isn’t enough information available to us, or our suppliers, to know exactly what life post-Brexit will look like. We’re all having to make a huge number of assumptions, and that isn’t very comfortable.

We source a lot of our plants from Europe. From 1 January, getting these plants across the border is going to become a lot more paperwork-heavy, slower, and probably more expensive.

I spoke to one of our main Netherlands-based plant suppliers last week, and they told me that, of all the businesses they deal with, and despite our small size, Lazy Flora is one of the best prepared to deal with Brexit that they have come across.

However, even with this reassurance, there has been very little guidance available to business owners, so we've had to do everything very last-minute as the information becomes available. We’re lucky to have been assigned our very own international trade expert by Nottingham City council, which has been a huge help. But it’s a bit nerve-wracking, and I don’t want to fob you off telling you that everything is going to be OK when we cannot yet absolutely guarantee it. We are as ready as it’s possible to be, and we are prepared to troubleshoot our butts off if we need to.

So I’m here sharing this with you, and asking quite openly, that if things do not go according to plan, for your patience and support. This year has been quite the perfect storm: a pandemic, Brexit, and a few fairly huge projects going on behind the scenes, each of which in their own right would have been enough work for us for one year (I will share more about those with you very soon. Hint: they are considerably more interesting, exciting and more plant-related than Brexit/pandemic updates!).

I’ll leave it there for now, and hope very much that this is the last time I’ll mention the dreaded B-word on this blog.

On a much more exciting note, we have so much to look forward to in 2021 and I cannot WAIT to share our plans with you.

Claire. Xx
Founder of Lazy Flora.

PS The team is just putting the finishing touches to a digital plant hunt that we’ll share with you towards the end of the year. Watch out for it around 30 December and make sure you are on our mailing list if you aren't already!