Yesterday I looked up how many people were selling mistletoe in the UK via Facebook Marketplace – and found that there were dozens and dozens of them. Some selling just a small amount, others with a production line of bundles tied with ribbon and a few advertising whole treefuls of mistletoe to anyone willing to come and gather it. The screen shots above and below show just a small sample.
I was a little astonished. Though perhaps shouldn’t have been. Mistletoe sales online have surged in recent years. This is partly, obviously, as private sales of anything via online systems – Ebay, Facebook, whatever – have boomed in recent years, but it is also a continuation of the trend that I and colleagues helped set in 2004/5. The whole concept of online mistletoe sales in the UK is something we helped pioneer.
It hardly existed 20 years ago when, as part of the then Tenbury English Mistletoe Enterprise partnership I suggested we try marketing using a website. I had, not entirely coincidentally, recently designed just such a concept as an exercise in an Open University course on website design, inspired partly by a US website I’d seen that sold the (vastly inferior in looks etc) US Christmas mistletoe. So I had a working draft – all we had to do was make it work. Which, after adapting that first design, we did over several years and, later, through a second business partnership, the English Mistletoe Shop. Selling freshly cut mistletoe, direct to the public, delivering via Royal Mail and DPD.
Rivals (many with annoyingly similar names!) sprang up within a year or two and there are now multiple businesses selling to the public online, via websites, packaging up mistletoe and despatching it in boxes via whatever courier they think works best. I can’t claim it was all because of that first effort – I assume it was always going to happen anyway – but I would suggest we pushed it all along a bit faster.
In a recent interview for BBC radio I was asked whether ‘all UK mistletoe was marketed via the Tenbury Wells auctions’ and did those auctions ‘set the price’ each year? Which is the impression you’d get from most media coverage of mistletoe sales – that Tenbury Wells is ‘the main market’ and the price there matters. This has never actually been true – much British mistletoe has always been traded independently of Tenbury and a lot of what is bought in Britain is imported anyway. But the recent explosion in online trading undermines the Tenbury ‘monopoly’ concept even more strongly. Tenbury’s auctions are important and significant, and long may they continue, but they are not quite the trend-setter that many believe.
Going back to those Facebook listings another phenomenon to note is the wide geographic range of the sales. Not just from mistletoe’s main areas of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire etc but from all over the country. This reflects the more domestic scale of this new trading – which can take advantage of the ‘pocket’ mistletoe colonies scattered around the country, and not be tied to the wider abundance in the core areas. It may also reflect increasing quantities of mistletoe in those more widespread populations – which is, in itself, a story worth talking about. And reminds me that I should soon be saying more, soon, about the ongoing MistleGO project which is seeking to document increasing mistletoe abundance across the country. More on that soon, but in the meantime – and to take part – visit the project website here.