Entry #7

Our team had decided that mass production of the terrariums would start on 3rd November. It was my job to ensure that we would obtain the necessary succulents needed for the making of the terrariums based on the 5 themes that we had previously decided upon. We planned to make a total of 100 terrariums and thus a large quantity of succulents are needed.

On 28th October, Cheryl, Cleo, Jia Xin and I decided to go down to Hua Hng Trading Company to choose the right plants for each theme that we would be working on. Once we had chosen the plants, we took photos of them. Hua Hng sold each pot of plant at a price of $2.50 for any number of pots. According to my research, Pick-A-Plant sold succulents at $1.20 per pot for an order of 100 pots which was a lot cheaper. With that, I assured the girls that I would contact Pick-A-Plant and ask them if they had the succulents that we had taken photo of.

I sent an email to Pick-A-Plant regarding the plants on the day itself. They gave me the contact number of one of their workers and asked me to coordinate with him to acquire the plants that I wanted. The worker was the same person that our group had previously talked to during our visit to Pick-A-Plant last month. His name was Mr Woon. I messaged Mr Woon through whatsapp and asked him if they had the same plants that we had chosen from Hua Hng. He said he was not sure and he would only be able to confirm it once a new shipment of plants arrives at Pick-A-Plant on 31st October.

Things got really hectic on the morning of 31st October! Mr Woon messaged and told me that he could only get 3 out of the 10 plants that I wanted through the shipment that he received on that day. He sent me the photos of the plants he received from the shipment and he asked me to choose the plants that I wanted from there as soon as possible. Apparently he had also forwarded the photos to other customers to choose too and he said if I did not choose quickly, there would not enough of quantities of plants for our group. I immediately contacted my groupmates and discussed which of the plants we should choose. Most of the plants that Mr Woon had looked so much different from the ones we wanted and it was very hard to choose. We also had to keep changing our decisions as the quantity of some of the plants we chose ran out by the time I asked Mr Woon.

After much trouble, we managed to choose the plants that we thought would suit our terrarium themes. As we had only seen these plants from the photos Mr Woon had sent, I was not really sure whether the plants would really be suitable for our terrariums. I asked Mr Woon if they could deliver about 58 out of the 100 plants that we had chosen first and told him that based on the experience with this first batch of delivery, we may change the plants for the second batch. He said that his boss was agreeable to that and would still charge us $1.20 per pot for the first delivery but he said for each delivery, $20 would be charged. My group was agreeable to it and thus we arranged for the first delivery.

I felt so relieved that today, we received our first delivery at Cheryl's house and the plants looked great!

Tomorrow we will be starting the mass production of our terrariums and I hope that plants chosen from Pick-A-Plant would really be suitable for our terrarium themes. We will see how it goes tomorrow.

Until next time, this is Shiju, signing off