The Delaware Valley Floral Group has reached an agreement to acquire certain assets of the Pittsburgh Cut Flower Co., with the acquisition to be completed on Aug. 1, according to a news release. PCF is a 118-year-old wholesaler serving Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. It is headquartered in Pittsburgh and has another location in Erie, PA.

“We are pretty excited about this,” Ken Wilkins, DVFG’s vicepresident of business development, said. “Pittsburgh Cut Flowers is a terrific company — very well known and respected for decades — so the opportunity to join forces with them and what will be a brand-new marketplace for us really is very exciting.”

The Pittsburgh and Erie locations will be consolidated into DVFlora, a division of DVFG, and the customers of those locations will be served through a new Cranberry, PA, facility, which will become a new DVFlora sales and distribution center. Salespeople and other key personnel from both locations will be joining DVFlora.

“One of the things that we are really pleased about is that we’ve been able to retain all 10 of the PCF salespeople,” Wilkins said. “We are in the process of working with those folks — training them on our system, our technologies, our processes and our inventory. And the customers will get an entirely new service model. We’re not just acquiring the company and changing the name on the door — we are actually changing the operating model. Our company operates different than most branch wholesalers — we have seven distribution centers, but we don’t have inventory in any of those distribution centers. Unlike a typical wholesale florist that might have multiple branches and each of those branches operate as mostly a standalone wholesale florist with local inventory for that local market, all of our customers are served from a single inventory that we have in Sewell, NJ, in our headquarters. The advantage of that is that it is really a massive inventory that all florists who are our customers within our territory have access to. So now come Aug. 1, all the PCF florists and all the florists in that marketplace will have access to our inventory.”

In addition to the inventory, Wilkins said another advantage DVFlora offers is its technology, including a website with its live inventory online.

“Customers can shop 24/7,” Wilkins said. “And sales with our DVFlora.com website have increased significantly each year. Now all the PCF customers will have access to the website and all the flowers, hardgoods, botanicals and gourmet [items] that are on that site.”

Wilkins added that DVFlora customers could be assured of receiving both early and consistent deliveries.

“We run our tractor-trailers out to our distribution centers in the middle of the night and we get our route trucks out from the distribution centers to the customers very early in the morning,” said Wilkins. “Many of our customers have keys to the florists’ shops and we make deliveries before they even arrive. So when the florists arrive in the morning, the product is waiting for them.”

Wilkins said the DVFlora “experimental” way of doing business has proven itself to be a very successful operating model with florists.

“When we made our first acquisition of the Seagroatt Floral Co. in Connecticut seven years ago, it was at that point kind of an experiment,” Wilkins said. “We were going to deploy our model and see how the marketplace accepted it — and it was hugely successful. So this will now represent our 10th and 11th acquisitions in the last seven years and it’s really not experimental anymore. We’ve been able to determine that florists really embrace our operating model. We’ve been able to grow in every market that we’ve gone into — that gives us confidence that when we go into Pittsburgh, we will be bringing a new model there that so far all the customers in the new markets that we’ve entered have really embraced.”