30 years ago Carmelo Felipe Acosta work with flowers for him Tenerife market. He always devised future projects for Vimass, a cut flower marketing company of which he is a part. Projects that would make it grow, but, above all, that would make it different, turn it into a benchmark, and allow it to enhance the charms of Tenerife.
He thought about it a lot but the idea arose just a month ago, at the most unexpected moment, when a friend of his daughter Hannah gave her a Harry Styles album for her birthday and inside the cover, there were different gifts, each one with the name of a song
At the end of the day, Carmelo thought about the work that the young woman had taken on and challenged himself: “Why not create something like that?” he said to himself.
In this way, it was proposed to capture in flowers a series of landscapes, experiences and sensations, also gastronomic, that a lover of his land wants to take and transmit through a package around the world.
The first creation of this collection is called Teide by night (night on Teide). It was this summer when it got dark in Las Cañadas and he thought how incredible that landscape was. One day the photo on which he based his creation appeared and he did not hesitate to develop the idea with Ceres Farm, the Ecuadorian company that paints flowers and works with Vimass.
A couple of weeks ago, he traveled to the Latin American country and explained his idea to the head of dyeing, he drew her a drawing, and she immediately grasped it. The next day she had already put it on her page.
“The first initial rose, the one that determines the rest of the painting, is just being marketed, because it is a painting and the painting must be formed,” explains this businessman from Los Realejos.
“I have the support of the company and the resources from the beginning, but I needed the person who understood the concept that I wanted to convey,” he insists.
The first thing is to dehydrate the flower, a task that takes between 8 and 9 hours so that it can absorb the dye, which is natural. As the background is dark again, it is painted and then you have to let it dry. “The painting is the easiest, the process is the most difficult and it lasts about ten days”, he certifies.
These special designs will be offered under the Vibra brand, through which Vimass markets its premium products, and will be sold as a package to be called Tenerife. In this way, anyone who enters the company’s website will be able to choose, assemble and buy the package of Tenerife sensations that they want.
The idea is just beginning but Teide by night is followed by other sensations that will materialize shortly and that he perfects day by day. Each of them is attached to a friend or loved one. The next one will be sunset with Campocha, because she always remembers what she felt with her friend Jonás that day at the Mirador de San Pedro.
And the same will happen with Jordi walking through El Pijaral, in Anaga, known as the Enchanted Forest path, or when his friend Juan tasted the octopus at Casa África, in Taganana, “the best I have ever tasted”.
“Being a creative person and supported by the right people can do wonders,” he says. And it is that Carmelo, like his brothers, the photographer Isidro Felipe Acosta and the documentary director Pedro Felipe Acosta, if he can boast of something, it is creativity.
90% of the flower used in the Canary Islands is imported, it is brought from Latin America, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, since the local crop has been disappearing for different reasons.
After the pandemic, everything changed, because it was one of the most affected sectors and despite this, there was an exaggerated demand.
At that moment, Carmelo decided to turn his business around when he saw that there were farmers who had no chance to sell and he couldn’t get out either. He spent two days talking to all his clients in the Canary Islands to see how to activate the business. His wife registered as a businesswoman and they began to sell at a time when no one was doing so, reaching agreements with the farmers.
They began to move, without subsidies or aid. There were no flights that brought flowers to Tenerife either, so they took the risk of doing it by boat from Algeciras. “The first few months it was crazy because they came together with the fruit and it releases ethylene, which is a poison for the flower,” he recalls.
“We had a very light structure, but little by little we began to position ourselves in the market and that helped customers begin to trust us, in our criteria and allowed us to grow,” he says. Above all, they imported carnations and later gray sage (Gypsophila Grandtastic), a highly sought-after species that florists use a lot for bridal bouquets and floral arrangements.
In parallel, in Ecuador the farms returned to painting flowers but without criteria and for this reason, taking advantage of a situation in which “we all needed each other” we began to help each other and change formats, boxes, together with Latin American companies, and to look for formulas to adapt to each end customer, whether they are shippers, florists or undertakers, who need a different size of stem, so we have to create new options within these combinations to find other market niches.
Carmelo Felipe wanted to be a benchmark in the sector, not someone who only bought and sold flowers. And he has achieved it.
