After a delayed start, the Online Flower Auction (OFA) is running well, says one of its initiators Paul Holla. Holla Roses, Berg RoseS and Bernhard Roses will be auctioning their entire 'clock production' through the OFA as of 18 November. This will give the 'digital one-day-ahead, on-site auction' a major boost.
The plan was for the OFA to open on 1 February 2022. At least, that was the date Arie van den Berg, Paul Holla and Bram Bernhard had in mind when they made their plans for the OFA public at the end of 2021. Due to delays in the creation of the IT infrastructure, the launch had to wait until 9 June. "We had hoped to be further along by now, but everything is running smoothly, we are healthy and we’re not in debt," says Paul Holla at the Holla Roses office in De Kwakel.
The initiators recently announced that they will be executing all of their auction clock sales through the OFA's clocks as of 18 November. Holla: "We reached a point where we had to make a choice: you can’t always expect buyers to log on to the OFA auction at 10:00 a.m. if our product has already been traded at RFH between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m.To persuade our buyers to make choices, we will have to make choices ourselves too. The time is right; we want OFA to keep growing." This means that the three initiators of the OFA will no longer be auctioning through RFH. They will (for now) remain members of RFH.