Europe: 20th anniversary of first European Flowerwebshop

A life without e-mails, texting, WhatsApp and social media? It is almost impossible these days. The world looks so different since the existence of the internet. The real internet pioneers immediately took their opportunity. One of them was Euroflorist, operating in the online gift industry with one of the largest network of florists worldwide. Together with Amazon, Euroflorist celebrate their 20th anniversary on the internet.

Peter Jungbeck

History
August 1995. Euroflorist launched their first webshop in Sweden. "It all started with an article I read about the 'Internet' and we decided to go to a seminar at the Lund University. It turned out that it mainly concerned the university network, which was quite slow. Something as simple as loading a page lasted a minute if not longer. We knew immediately that this could be very interesting for our company," says former CEO and founder Peter Jung Beck.

Jungbeck decided to go 'online' as Euroflorist and made his first step into the unknown world of the internet. We had just one computer with internet, this one was used to exchange orders with partners worldwide. "It went a bit slow, not a lot of people were using the internet back then. But the most important thing was that we were online. We were one of the five companies in our branch with a webshop," said Jungbeck.

A couple of years later during Valentine's Day they got an enormous amount of orders. Suddenly hundreds of orders came in. "We were overwhelmed by all those orders, it was quite exciting. This was the real beginning of our webshop," said Fredrik Sundberg, now one of the directors within the EuroFlorist Group, who was there that year.

"During that time, people found us by using Yahoo or Altavista, nowadays most of the people use Google," explains Sundberg. "Later on we started cooperating with a few homepages. Now we get the most clicks through them."

In 2005, Euroflorist won the Microsoft.NET Award for the most modern webshop of Europe. Besides flower orders you can also upload an address book and calendar.

Founder Peter Jungbeck still can't believe how quickly developments are going. "In 1995 we never thought that the internet would grow this big. Looking back on the past ten years, it is above all expectations, that we started as a network and grew to an e-commerce driven organization. Pretty amazing isn't it?"

For more information:
Euroflorist Europe B.V
De Entree 143-145
1101 HE Amsterdam
E: [email protected]
www.euroflorist.nl