Tea feeds my soul.  A friend of mine who owns a small tea company recently challenged me to stop writing so much about the business of tea and wear my soul on my sleeve a little more.  So I’m taking this opportunity to describe why I’ve developed a passion for tea.
It’s true that much of [...]

While Beverly Hills Psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman interviewed me on her radio show on August 17, 2010, she surmised that I must have a warm and happy childhood memory about tea that led me to have the passion and fascination I have for tea today. We were talking about my new book, but, of course, [...]

People ask me how we came up with the name “Tavalon” and I always answer by saying that I locked myself in a room for 30 days and did nothing but brainstorm.  All joking aside, naming the business was probably one of the most difficult tasks during the start-up phase.  Many entrepreneurs have this problem [...]

Design, aesthetics, and visual appeal are important aspects of creating an exceptional shopping experience for consumers visiting a website.  The look and feel of a company’s site speaks to who they are as a brand, and what type of customer they want to attract.
Of course, we all know beauty is only skin deep, so a [...]

Whether you have a business or plan on starting one, begin thinking now about how to safeguard your intellectual property.  The way Colonel Sanders fried his chicken and the process Glen Bell used for bending tortillas into a taco shape when he started Taco Bell - these are examples of intellectual property that were at the [...]

Consistently ranked among the Top 10 tea-producing countries in the world and frequently in the Top 5, Turkey today is a tea powerhouse on both the production and consumption sides of the equation.  However, that has not always been the case.  From the time the first tea seedlings were imported to Turkey from Japan and [...]

While traveling and enjoying the incredible weather up here in beautiful British Columbia this summer, I’ve taken notice of a growing trend percolating throughout this great province of ours. The menu boards in teahouses and cafés are now offering an incredible array of tea-based lattes.  Even in some of the most off-the-beaten-track hovels, there is [...]

Why is it that the keys to building customer loyalty are so obvious and yet so few companies do it well? Any consumer can tell you what they want from a retailer, and most of them will also tell you that the majority of companies do a pretty poor job converting customers into passionate fans. [...]

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 [...]

July 16 was the two-year anniversary of our Temecula store - California Tea & Coffee Brewery.  We opened in the worst economy in my lifetime, in a location Starbucks didn’t want (which means no drive-through and hidden from the main street it sits back from), and in a county where unemployment is about 15% (their [...]