Arena Flowers, which generated revenue of £47.3 million last year, has acquired the online plant delivery business Patch Plants in a deal which offers Patch Plants’ founder Freddie Blackett the role of chief strategy officer at the combined business. The VC investors behind Patch Plants – Octopus Ventures and Forward Partners will become shareholders in Arena as part of the deal.
Patch Plants, founded in 2015, had seen demand drop over the past year with consumers returning to high streets rather than buying as much online as well as the general tightening of disposable income as inflation began to take its toll.
John Hackett, CEO at Arena Online told Direct Commerce: “We will fully integrate our teams and use the strengths of both businesses to complement one another (we see this as a massive benefit of the acquisition because the teams are genuinely so well matched in terms of values, ambition and energy but have distinct and complementary skills).”
“The Arena team will spend the first quarter focused on the efficient and profitable delivery of our peak periods (Valentine’s and Mother’s day) while we’ll also be working, in parallel, on integration and transformation with Freddie and his team. That process of integration and transformation will execute through Q2 and should be complete by the end of June so that the Patch customer base is benefitting from all of the capabilities of Hyperion as quickly as possible (July onwards).”
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