Our story begins in Europe in 1908 when visionary florist Max Hübner founded (Deutsche Blumenspenden-Vermittlung) The German Flower Gifting Service in Berlin. His brilliant idea was that the orders should travel, not the flowers! Within a year, 98 florists had signed up. Today you would think of it as e-commerce; back then, it was a groundbreaking idea that planted the roots for everything we still do today. By 1913 that had grown to 350 members, and after he moved to Zurich to join his new wife in her Flower shop ( still in business today!), he developed a network of many more. By 1927 he had secured the collaboration of 3,064 florists in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium. In the same year, Fleurop (the name derived from «Flores Europae,» meaning the flowers of Europe) was founded as an international florist organization at a gathering in Zurich’s Kursaal. Max Hübner was unanimously elected as the first president of the European Fleurop organization, and Zurich was chosen as the location of its first head office.

Meanwhile, over in the US, The Florists’ Telegraph Delivery (FTD) was formed in 1910 by another visionary florist, the romantically named John Valentine, who organized a small group of florists to exchange orders by telegraph. Flowers on both sides of the world were being delivered thanks to the technology of the time. Those early years also saw the first use of the Mercury Man logo and slogan ́Say it with flowers’ – amazing to think 100 years later, they would both become an iconic part of the brand.

In the UK, Carl Englemann, a nursery owner from Essex, and Joe Dobson, a florist in Glasgow, had heard about the FTD and applied to bring the concept to the other side of the Atlantic. By 1923 FTD officially set up the British Unit and, in 1925, officially changed the name to Florists’ Transworld Delivery network.

As an international group composed of Fleurop/ Interflora / FTD, it’s fitting that our European roots are intertwined with the US and the UK, from a shared vision developed separately yet growing simultaneously, and eventually uniting people around the world through a shared love of flowers.

Our Think Global Act Local strategy may seem modern, but it is embedded in our roots. Fleurop introduced the Fleurin based on the Swiss franc that allowed florists to see how much an order was worth in guilders or francs back in 1935 – a form of common currency long before the Euro existed! International collaboration had long been part of the group’s identity, and finally, in 1946, all the different strands of our group came together. The International group was formed in Copenhagen between Fleurop (for continental Europe), the Interflora British Group (for Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and the FTD (for North and South America and Japan)– a genuinely global flower network was born!
In 1953 The FTD British unit became known as Interflora UK.