07.29.10
Part 1 - The inspiration
posted by John-Paul Lee | 3 comments
In 2005, I was working for a consulting company called Accenture. I enjoyed the job, but didn’t love it, and was always looking for a way to break out of the corporate rat race. I was working and living in London for a client engagement and frequented Covent Garden for coffee on the weekends. Then on one particular visit to Covent Garden on a random Sunday afternoon, changed everything. I was seated at a café when I noticed that no one around me - folks both young and old, from all different walks of life - was sharing in my coffee-drinking experience. Instead, everyone was enjoying tea. Literally, everyone had a string hanging over their cups!
As an American, used to the frenetic fast-paced life coffee chains have inspired, this struck me as unusual, but fascinating. I grew up in a Korean-American household and drank more tea than water in my home, but never saw tea as a business opportunity. I immediately went online to research more about tea. Once I realized that tea was the second most widely consumed beverage in the world only behind water, I was convinced where I wanted to be.
So I began my travels and visits to various tea houses, tea plantations, tea salons, and tea bars throughout Europe and Asia to collect information. By the end of the two-year research period, I had visited over 300 of them. Despite the fact that tea was so popular globally, domestically it ranked after soda, juice, beer, milk, and coffee. It occurred to me that this was due to poor marketing and the perception of tea in the United States. Tea is still a very foreign concept in the U.S. Americans view tea variously as Asian, European, your grandmother’s sip, a pinky-up-in-the-air beverage, and only to be consumed when sick. I knew I could change this with creative marketing, strong branding, and education. We have the best PR company in the world behind us - called the medical industry - pumping out three to four studies per month telling us why everyone should be drinking tea!
I was ready when I came back to the States. I immediately quit my job, and began preparations to start a tea company.
July 29th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Isn’t it interesting that even if we grew up with something, we don’t necessarily learn to value or appreciate it until later in our lives. So many things came together on that particular sunday to set tea in motion in your life. And to think it didn’t even involve whole leaf tea ……….who would have thought? I’m looking forward to hearing your unfolding story.
July 29th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
There is no giant in the loose leaf tea area yet, even in China, still there is room.
July 30th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Hi John-Paul. I enjoyed interviewing you for TChing a couple of months ago, and glad to see you have joined us as a contributor! Okay, what jumped out at me was ‘a string hanging over their cup’. It’s shocking to me that loose leaf tea has been overlooked until recently in so many places in th world. My neighbor from Wales has tea bags at home ‘for the convenience’. She comes here
for a great loose leaf Darjeeling, but is just used to buying tea bags at home. Grrrrrrr. The big tea companies have sold people on ‘convenience’ and part of what we are trying to do is overcome that as a specialty (loose leaf) industry. As Daniel notes, there is no giant yet, and maybe the pie will be divided without one big Starbucksian giant in this industry, but the winner(s) will have to be able to unsell ‘convenience’ of bags and show that loose leaf is a viable and the best tasting way to enjoy tea.