Iran war: ‘Getting very hard’: Auckland florist warns on rising prices
Friday, 17 April 2026
The Post’s Under The Pump series investigates how the global fuel crunch is disrupting New Zealand businesses - but more importantly, how they’re planning to survive.
For second-generation florist Nima Nikkhah, a love of flowers runs in the family.
But the Iran-born and Auckland-based florist says disruptions from the war in his home country are having far-reaching impacts, including on his business and the industry he has been part of for 30 years.
The founder and general manager of Event Flowers, which was set up six years ago and is part of Fresh Direct, says costs such as for transport, couriers, fertiliser and even heating the flowers in glasshouses that grow flowers over winter are rising.
“When diesel and petrol goes up, everything goes up,” Nikkhah told The Post.
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“We’re using urgent courier for some deliveries, and for each delivery they were charging us $15-$16 per unit. Now they charging $23-$24.”
The Mt Wellington business sources 70% of its flowers from around New Zealand, and the rest internationally, from countries such as Colombia and Malaysia.
It creates floral arrangements for events, and created the centrepieces for the opening event of the New Zealand International Convention Centre, impressive arrangements made out of vegetables, herbs and fruit.
It also supplied centrepieces to Eden Park for the Rugby World Cub in 2011.
A big worry for Nikkhah, who typically starts his day at 3am, was flowers would become out of reach for the consumer.
“If flowers get too expensive then people will not buy them. It's kind of getting to be a very hard situation, and I'm just hoping this is going to finish very soon and we can get back to some sort of normality again.”
Some in the industry were intentionally taking a hit to margins by absorbing increased costs, but that could only be done for so long before they would have to be passed onto consumers, Nikkhah said.
“You want to buy a bunch of flowers for your partner, and you look at a tiny bouquet that is $200 then you'll be like ‘With $200 I can buy a couple of bottles of wine, and I can buy a couple of boxes of chocolate’, then next time you would consider a different type of the gift or different things, and slowly without noticing, it will destroy the industry.”
Nikkhah said it was a fine line balancing rising costs and trying to shelter customers from the rising prices.
“There is only so much I can push my prices up so that it is still affordable for people to buy and enjoy.“
His company has several revenue streams, including contracts with funeral homes and ongoing work with corporate clients, but Nikkhah said he had noticed corporates pull back on their budgets.
“We are still trying to take some of those costs on us in order to get the business going and make it seem affordable.”
Nikkhah’s father was also a florist in Iran, where his own passion for the industry came from. He started dabbling in flowers at age eight or nine.
It was, Nikkhah said, very sad what was happening in the Middle East.
“It's unfortunate that we cannot live in the world understanding that we all are human, and we should be united together to have a better place for our future kids and the next generation. It's all very sad.”