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Why start a small tea company? With the advertising boom of the 1960s onwards, the costs of packaging, marketing and advertising has eaten a big hole in production costs and inevitably, tea quality has been compromised. For the past 30-odd years, the cheapest thing in a packet of tea has often been – the tea! Of course, it is always possible to buy a superior tea and sell it at a premium price, but what about the 'everyday' tea as it used to be? I realized that, by cutting down on packaging costs and relying on ‘word-of-mouth’ recommendations, it would be possible to supply, on a regional basis, a high quality tea at an everyday price. Thus my wife Gill and I launched our first tea company in 1989. Minimal Packaging - Memorable Teas. The whole concept was to reverse the trend – to spend as much as possible on the best teas my skills could find and as little as possible on everything else. So, my job is to source and select consistently fine teas to appeal to people looking for traditionally good tea at an everyday price. As for the packaging – we started with soft, heat-sealed bags and one colour labels. Those went amazingly well at food fairs, but the shops couldn’t stack them, so in the early 1990s we changed to plain white cartons (cheaper!) and labels which we still design and print ourselves. Word-of-mouth has been extremely successful and the tea is sold in independent outlets all over |