Category: Analysis

We grow old because we stop playing

January 21, 2014 / / 8 Comments

Yunnan…

Yunnan? Yes I know, you know everything about this region and its teas.

But let me surprise you. I am not going to talk to you about this but rather about a game named Yunnan, a game about tea, trade and merchant houses (yes trade and merchant houses why else would I be interested in a tea game?).

 

This game is about running a merchant house on the path of success along the road of tea and horses.

It is not an easy game and it seems so complex that after going two or three times through the rules and making everything ready, we did not play it.

 

But first things first. Here is the board with everything ready to play and you will notice the cups full of a Yunnan Imperial Tea ready to be drunk during the game.

Yunnan boardgame

Yunnan board game

Yunnan boargame with rules

Yunnan board game with rules

Now here are my thoughts on this game.

It is a complex game with almost no luck involved (I say almost while you do have a little bit of it in the way you find out who should play when).

You have to select carefully what your merchants (which are more or less the people acting for you) will do: travel (bringing in tea), buy improvements (which will allow you to be more efficient in a specific field).

Then you have to connect your merchants, trading posts… to avoid paying logistical costs when they bring back the tea to the main town but at the main time, you should try to avoid the ever present inspector or neutralise it thanks to your political influence.

 

From what I understood there is not a simple and unique path to victory. It depends on what all the players are doing and this is what I find really interesting in the concept.

 

After going through Internet and looking at different websites, it seems the game is best played with 3-4 players, even if rules for 2 are provided.

This might be what we missed in our game.

 

If you want to look for yoursefl, here is the game page http://www.argentum-verlag.de/yunnan_en.html and then the Board Game Geek one http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143401/yunnan

All that glisters…

December 28, 2013 / / 5 Comments

Following the guest post on my blog, I wanted to have a little more quantitative approach to the evolution of the American tea market.

So I looked for data from some sources and found something quite interesting at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO): all the tea imports between 1986 and 2011 for 5 countries (Canada, France, Germany, UK, USA).

Why these countries? To compare things between countries that are perceived as similar in terms of consumption but not in terms of history and relationships to the tea.

I reworked the stats a little (for example starting in 1991 to get the same data from all these countries) and here are the first results.

041 - 5 countries

The USA imports more and more tea (43,000 tons more or over +50% in 21 years) whereas these tea imports drops in the United Kingdom (-13% but only a little over 23,000 tons less).

Even if their tea imports increased overtime, the 3 other countries I selected don’t play in the same league. With a little under 55,000 tons imported each year, Germany plays in the second league while with under 20,000 tons each year, Canada and France are obviously in the third one but all of them share something with the USA: the increase over the years ranging from +38% (France), +44% (Canada), +118% (Germany).

From this first analysis, we can conclude that the USA is a big tea importer and that if everything goes well for them, it could really soon beat their only rival, the United Kingdom.

The next question is what they make with all this tea.

And to know the answer (or a part of it), the question is where does all this tea comes from?

Below is a map that shows every country that exported tea to the USA even once between 1991 and 2011.

041 - US tea imports

Seeing some rather exotic countries in the list like Greenland or some other small one is the joy of statistics on international trade.

This problem coupled with the low frequency of some of these trades doesn’t help us a lot. So I decided to eliminate those who had traded for less than 10 years over the period 1991-2011.

041 - US tea imports 10 years

This map is a little more interesting but displays the countries where some companies are located or countries that re exported tea to the USA.

When focusing on those with an average export level of more than 1,000 tons per year, only a few countries are left with two kinds of countries: those re exporting what they brought (Great Britain and Germany) and those exporting directly.

041 - US tea imports 10000 tons

These 11 countries exported in 2011 118,260 tons to the USA with Argentina being the first (50,034 tons) followed by China (26,335 tons) and India (12,564 tons).

What can we deduce from these elements?

Probably something that you all know that in spite or because of their huge imports, people in the USA (as a whole) do not drink high quality tea (I read that Argentinian tea was mostly used for bags and iced teas).

This is not a scoop but I suspect that there is a trend under this for higher/more exotic teas that could really change the way tea is perceived/drunk.

This will probably the next step in my analysis: find some value statistics and try to link them to those I already collected so that I can get a complete overview.

Tea time in America

December 8, 2013 / / 12 Comments

I was asked by people at Seattle Coffee Gear if I was interested in a post by them and among the subjects they were thinking of was “Tea in America”.

Since this topic is of interest to me, I gave a go ahead and I began searching myself to provide later a complementary look at it.

In other words, stay tuned but first let’s leave the floor to my guest.

 

“But the kettle’s on the boil

And we’re so easily called away

Hands across the water

Heads across the sky”

– Paul McCartney

 

Greetings from America, where it looks like we may (finally) adopt tea into our daily routine. Tea has come and gone from our culture several times based on availability, fashion and, of course, politics. It is time to dust of granny’s teapot, from all indicators, tea is here to stay.

 

With the recent purchase of the Teavana chain of stores, Starbucks is betting they can do for tea popularity what they did for coffee popularity. Teavana has over 300 stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico located in popular shopping mall locations. Starbucks has plans to expand and triple that amount. Currently Teavana sells teas and tea ware and some locations are being revamped to sell prepared food and beverages.

 

According to NPR, the wholesale value of tea has grown from $2 billion to $10 billion over the past 20 years. Currently there are about 4,000 specialty tea rooms and retail stores in the U.S. There are many demographic factors that indicate a continued economic boost for tea sales including aging baby boomers and an increased Asian population. The time is ripe for tea.

 

The preference here has always been for black tea, preferably iced, which makes up 85% of the U.S. market. This is why McDonalds offers Sweet Tea (water, sugar, orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea) nationwide, not just in the Southern states where the iced drink has always been popular.

Caution: What falls on the floor after roasting could end up in your 32 ounce iced tea

While this tea revolution is being led by corporate giants McDonalds, Starbucks, Pepsi (Brisk) and Coca-Cola (Honest Tea), small specialty tea shops are quietly doing more business. With increased awareness of tea comes increased demand for premium teas, because a rising tide lifts all boats (and teacups).

 

Some die-hard tea enthusiasts have a hard time welcoming the onslaught of new tea drinkers. Tea blogger A.C. Cargill laments there is ‘Too much emphasis on fancy tea rooms and fancy flavorings, not the real tea experience.’ A similar phenomenon happened with coffee, Starbucks was established in 1971 but the Third Wave of coffee did not take shape until 30 years later. Right now is a great opportunity for tea educators to expedite the evolution.

 

Shiuwen Tai, a tea shop owner and tea educator in Seattle, offers classes about how tea is grown, harvested and processed. She specializes in Taiwanese Oolong teas and leads annual trips to meet the producers. Her enthusiasm for quality tea is contagious and she shares her knowledge during tea tastings, general interest classes and lectures on advanced topics. She says people who appreciate fine coffee or fine wine will have an easier understanding when she talks about what makes a fine tea.

 

The East Coast is also seeing more shops devoted to fine tea. Tea server and blogger Nicole Martin reports, ‘Most in my area are brand new. Radiance Tea House in New York City is probably coming up on 8 or so years though. My favorite is definitely Tea Drunk’ (in the East Village). Both of these shops offer classes and tastings to further educate customers about fine teas.

 

Fresh roasted tea from Floating Leaves Tea in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington

A little more tea education and it is possible some Americans may trade corporate tea’s quantity for local business’ quality, and a 1 liter cup of Sweet Tea for a 100ml gaiwan. Either way, tea is here to stay!

 

Samantha Joyce is a writer for Seattle Coffee Gear in Seattle, Washington and enjoys sharing her knowledge of all things coffee and tea. Currently she enjoys steeping Oriental Beauty Oolong in a gaiwan to impress her coffee-loving friends and family.

Average? Average? Do I look like an average?

October 24, 2013 / / 8 Comments

We recently had on one of the blogs hosted here at Teatra.de the beginning of a discussion regarding what is the tea community like in the USA or in the Old World (I really like using some “strange” place names from time to time).

My mind immediately jumped on the strange idea of defining an average tea drinker in the USA and in my own country and those I travel to on a regular basis.

I then gave this idea a little more thought and with my good old mathematical background, I found this was a silly idea for several reasons.

Don’t leave yet, you shouldn’t be worried, I won’t begin to focus on concepts such as mean, average, central tendency… I will leave that your former, actual or future maths teachers.

I just decided to go along with my thoughts and give you some ideas of why I came to that conclusion.

Let’s begin with some data provided by the UK Tea Council.

According to them, 165,000,000 cups of tea are drunk in the UK everyday and with 63,181,775 inhabitants, each of them should drink 2.61 cups a day.

This doesn’t seem much for a so-called tea loving country, does it?

Since 96% of all cups of tea drunk daily in the UK are brewed from tea bags, this implies that either 0.11 cup per day and per capita is made of loose leaf tea or that around 2,528,735. 63 people in the whole UK make their 2.61 cups a day with loose leaf.

I then decided to focus on my own market (so to speak) and I looked at different information sources on the French tea drinkers.

The first I found was in a market intel file on green and black teas in France made by the CBI (Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries, a Dutch Agency).

“As with wines, French consumers are looking especially for “Grand Crus”.”

“The extending tea market also involves a growing emphasis on factors such as traceability, employee working conditions on plantations and sustainability, as well as production in specific regions. French consumers want to know where their tea comes from and how it was grown and blended. Customers love to feel a connection to the source; it adds to their sense of enjoyment and pleasure and increases their understanding of their cup of tea.”

The second intel source was some information provided by the Ministry of Agriculture which basically said: tea is made in majority with bagged teas (with almost twice as much black tea being drunk as green one) and the main drinkers are in the Ile-de-France (Paris and the surroundings) or in the Western part of the country.

When you try to define a profile of an average French tea drinker, with these two different sources you get obviously nothing as they seem to be speaking of two different countries or groups of people.

Why is that? Because there is not such thing as an average tea drinker.

We all like it in a different way that might be completely opposite to our neighbour, and be far from this average picture of tea drinkers.

Does this make us an unworthy tea drinker? I don’t think so. Tea is about all of us being different and there are so many things to discover, experiment…

So next time someone tries to tell you what an average/normal/typical tea drinker is/should be, just tell him/her “Average? Average? Do I look like an average?” and then drink your favoured tea the way you want.

What is in a name? Simplicity or rather simplicitea

September 26, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I had plans to write about a specific topic but last week-end, I spoke with a really nice old lady.

She asked me if I had any hobbies and among my answers was tea (the others wouldn’t really interest you, would they?).

This was the beginning of some questions regarding tea and its colours, the different producing countries, the plant… as she told me she didn’t know a thing about tea.

And as I began explaining things like that green and black teas are made of the same plant or that the different tea colours are “just” the result of different fermentation and oxidation processes (to make it real simple), I thought to myself “what is with tea that makes people so confused?”

I gave some more thoughts to this question and I had several other coming to my mind.

Why is tea so complex? Or rather why does it appear so? Isn’t this a way for us tea lovers to be a little mysterious and have a certain aura around us (the one of the guy or girl that knows how to do something the others don’t)? What is so different between coffee and tea that makes people think that tea is produced by several plants?

I think there is a need for more simplicity around our favourite drink. Why? First of all, being able to explain something in a simple way is a proof of one’s mastery of the concept. The poet Nicolas Boileau said (the translation is mine and mine alone) “What is well thought is clearly stated/and the right words to say it come easily.”

This must be our goal when speaking about tea because (and this is the second point) non knowledgeable people will get confused about complex explanations and since we are all both enthusiastic and full of knowledge, we will always be eager to say more than less.

And this might scare a lot of people. While going for the KISS (or Keep It Simple Stupid) rule will help us explain our hobby and passion to a lot of people and you might even make them try this strange thing we are drinking.

The second reason is that we (as tea drinkers but this also happens to anyone who knows) might be a bit haughty when dealing with other people that are true beginners as we know how to do it right (and sometimes more than some people trying to sell us tea)

I know that you, dear reader, do not fall in this category (no not at all) but let me tell you there are some people that do.

What will they achieve with such behaviour? Frighten people, make them unwilling to learn more. In other words, they will go against the “spirit” of tea as we all know that tea is not only a drink but something you share with people, something to enjoy be it alone or with other people.

So from now on, I will try to do that and also here on my blog: speak in a simple way but not with simplistic ideas.

I hope you will join me in this quest for simplicitea.

What is in a name? Positioning

July 28, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Let me clarify something first, this post is not meant to judge any brand/product or to imply that they are not delivering what they say they are.

Positioning is how a brand tries to find a set of attributes to get a clear, attractive, different position on a market. It is also what you, I, anybody expects a brand to be or to do according to what they say they are (usually their core “philosophical” value that most of the time can be found on their website under “about us”) and what we think they are (as our perception of them might be slightly different of what the companies would like to sell us).

 I did a little non-scientific survey and took a look at different tea companies from different countries, supplying tea bags and/or loose leaf ones.

What did I find?

Words like finest, health, lifestyle, tastes, wonderful, quality, perfection, refinement, premium, tradition, simplicity, uniqueness, best seem to come back on a regular basis with a few others being

If you remember the whole idea of companies and marketing is to make one product or one brand looks different than the others to be able to sell it and one tool to visualise it is perceptual mapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_mapping)

Author : Mydogategodshat / This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

I decided to try to make a perceptual map with the words I had found while looking at the different websites and to my “surprise”; in nearly all the combinations I could make/find, there was no way to really separate the different companies (there were always a couple of companies that would not really be in the same place as the pack but they were really minor ones).

The only item in which there were clear differences is the tradition/simplicity (or modern) approach (and apart from a couple of them, I am not even sure how the companies really perceive these two words) and when looking at the countries of each company, it seems this simplicity/modern thing is more seen in the USA and other English speaking countries whereas the other countries are more adept of the “tradition” approach to tea (but there are exceptions in both groups).

Why this split? Perhaps some more in-depth research on both the key words and my conclusions should be made but I think that it comes from the clichés these different countries have on tea and the perceived need by those trying in the past years to launch tea companies in the USA that in order for the market to rise, there was a need to simplify things to make them more appealing to the “average” consumer, still full of “old ladies drinking their tea with some milk at 5 o’clock in the afternoon” and of people selling them that “the perfect tea must be brewed for 5.2 minutes at exactly 87.4°C and with a water coming from Greenland (the last trusted water resort).”

What are the risks of not being able to differentiate one company from another (in terms of who they pretend to be)? To be unable to deal with their commitment and to lose potential new customers unable to make the difference between this or that brand and the one that said the same thing but tasted “not so good.”

In the end, the customers will be the one judging the companies and their products and companies have to deliver what they promised to.

Perhaps is it time for companies to become more openly different one from another?

All it took was one ship

June 20, 2013 / / 6 Comments

All it took for me to think about this topic was one ship.

If only this was true, it would make a good story but the truth is that I came across the topic of this Swedish East India Company (or SOC in Swedish) through some researches on old statistics of tea trade. When I found out that this company was quite successful in spite of several problems (more on that later in this blog post) and in spite of being among the lesser known East India Companies (most people knowing only the British, Dutch and French ones), I knew I had something interesting to look at.

This was confirmed a bit later when I went to the Armada in Rouen (a famous gathering of big sailing ships) and saw the Götheborg, the sailing replica of a 18th-century ship that sank right before getting back into its harbour in Göteborg, fully loaded with goods from China.

034-Götheborg-full

Götheborg in full

034-Götheborg-closer

Götheborg, a closer look

This was an obvious sign of destiny.

What is so peculiar with this company? And why not another small one like the Imperial Ostend Company (yes I know I am the best when it comes to finding obscure and unknown references or names)? First of all because it lasted longer (from 1731 to 1813, even if no ships were sent from 1807 on) and also because it was quite successful.

Successful, I hear all of you saying but we never heard of it. How can a company be successful and leave nothing but a ship in the memories of Western people?

To show how successful it was, I will give you some raw data of the number of ships sent to China (almost all those listed below were heading towards this country), the pounds of tea shipped back (mostly to be smuggled back to Great Britain) and the pounds of tea officially sold by the East India Company in the same country.

To understand these figures, you have to know that in 1784, the Commutation Act was passed in England reducing the taxes on tea from 119% to 12.5% (thanks to Richard Twining of the Twinings Tea Company) and in these times, news were slow to move from one country to another and the ships of 1785 might have been sent without any knowledge of this Act.

Year

Number of ships sent

Pounds of tea shipped

Pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC

1767

2

3 066 143

4 681 891

1768

2

3 186 220

6 668 717

1769

1

1 494 509

7 984 684

1770

2

3 076 642

7 723 538

1771

no account

3 000 000

5 566 793

1772

2

2 746 800

5 882 953

1773

1

1 489 700

2 571 902

1774

2

4 088 100

5 687 384

1775

2

2 562 500

5 475 498

1776

2

3 049 100

3 763 540

1777

2

2 851 200

4 304 277

1778

2

3 258 000

3 402 271

1779

2

2 626 400

5 457 138

1780

3

4 108 900

5 588 315

1781

2

3 267 300

3 578 499

1782

3

4 265 600

4 166 854

1783

3

4 878 900

3 087 616

1784

none

8 608 473

1785

4

6 212 400

13 165 715

1786

1

1 747 700

13 985 506

Total

40

60 976 114

121 351 564

Average cargo per ship sent

1 524 403

Year

Number of ships sent

Pounds of tea shipped

Pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC

1787

2

2 890 900

14 045 709

1788

2

2 589 000

13 429 408

1789

none

14 537 967

1790

none

14 682 968

1791

1

1 591 330

15 090 781

1792

1

1 559 730

15 821 101

1793

1

756 130

15 833 660

1794

none

16 642 448

1795

2

2 759 800

17 794 897

1796

none

16 549 563

1797

2

1 406 200

16 319 254

1798

1

1 408 400

18 808 617

1799

1

444 800

19 910 292

1800

2

2 202 400

20 358 827

1801

none

20 022 261

1802

2

1 427 067

21 837 698

1803

none

21 647 922

1804

2

2 352 666

18 501 904

1805

none

21 025 310

1806

none

19 655 973

Total

19

21 388 423

352 516 560

Average cargo per ship sent

1 125 706

Ships sent to China by the SOC with the pounds of tea shipped back compared to the pounds of tea sold in Great Britain by the EIC from 1767 to 1806 (source: Oriental Commerce by William Milburn, 1813)

Now since you all know that Sweden is not the most Western or maritime country in Europe, you will probably ask why did they venture on these high seas and why were they so successful?

I heard you in the back, the answer is not “because they are Vikings”.

Money is the answer as after the Greath Northern War (1700-1721), Sweden, the former Baltic Sea major power, was impoverished and trade was seen as one of the options to help the country recover.

It didn’t go without all kinds of struggle as at first tea and porcelain were seen as “poor goods” to be traded for the traditional and well-known timber and steel. Furthermore, the nascent Swedish textile industry saw the Asian textiles as direct competitors and wanted to avoid it.

Part of the solution came from the closing of the Ostend Company as English and other foreigners who could not trade via foreign companies had to find a new “home” to help them make some profits.

Following a discussion in the Sweden Parliament, the company was formed in 1731 and was given a royal chart for at first 15 years.

What set it aside from the other Indian Companies in the different countries? First of all, secrecy was to be maintained around the shareholders and finance (ie the books were burned at the end of each trip). Why? Because all countries forbade their citizens to trade with Asia without going through their “national” companies, which were not able to satisfy every demand (and the potential profits were also hampered by high taxes).

They could also not trade in any port belonging to any State in Europe, unless they had been authorized by the local authorities to do so.

The other rules were shared by the other companies and as such I will only list them: all departures and arrivals were to be made from Gothenburg, the Swedish State taxed everything, the ships were to be built and outfitted in Sweden and at first the subscribers were only in for one trip (this changed in 1753).

The ships when at sea followed a specific trade routine. Leaving Gothenburg with iron, copper and timber, they headed towards Cadiz in Spain to trade their goods for Spanish (or should I say South American) silver (the company being prohibited to use Swedish coins, remember mercantilism?), which was the basis of the trade with Asia. From there, it sailed mostly to China, bringing back tea (and some other items like porcelain).

What made this company so successful?

My analysis (but after all if you have read up to now, it is because you want to read it or because you thought this was about Vikings selling teas) is that they made it because they had good leaders, they focused on one niche with potential and didn’t try to fight too openly those already on the market.

For the good leaders, one just has to look at its founders: you have some Scots merchants, some former Hanseatic ones and some Swedish ones. Some had experience with the former Ostend Company (and thus with Asian trade), others with European trade and others were well connected but all of them were men of experience that wanted to get more money from trading.

For example, Colin Campbell was a Scot merchant that had a huge debt to pay and that wanted to pay it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Campbell_%28Swedish_East_India_Company%29).

The focus on the niche is obvious when looking at the value split of the cargo at Gothenburg. Most of the times, 90% of it was tea, a good that could be easily put into a ship in good quantities, had a market with people ready to pay for it (thanks to the high taxes), something that ensured a good return on investment since with less cost per pound (more on that in a few lines) you could sell it under the official price (but still with a good margin) and know that you would be able to sell everything.

The benefits of not fighting openly those already on the market part were twofold. On the one hand, by deciding not to “colonize” or create “factories”, the Swedish East India Company was probably seen as a lesser threat to the big players (see the numerous and costly fights between the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French for the control of the Indian sea and the Asian trade) and on the other hand, it avoided the extra burden of having to build fortifications, keep garrisons, wage wars… Hence the less cost per pound of cargo unloaded.

All this made the SOC, a successful and profitable company until the British government decided to drop the tax level bringing the “official” tea back into the competition and making smuggling not worth the cost.

This was one market evolution too much for the SOC, a company that had put all its eggs in the same basket and wasn’t able/willing to find new waters to swim in them.

“The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” or the art of selecting teas

May 27, 2013 / / 6 Comments

I was reading a compendium of novellas in the Dying Earth setting (a Jack Vance’s invention and for those of you who don’t know what I am speaking about, here is a link) when I came across one dealing with the finest wines on Earth, robbery and a sybaritic poet/sorcerer, “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” by Robert Silververg.

This Erzuine Thale had a really interesting ceremonial since each morning, he decided which wines he was going to drink, when and why. Some where there to lighten his mood, to allow him to sleep, to give him inspiration…

This made me wonder if I could do that or if anyone was doing something like this?

Since I don’t do that (I prefer to focus on the present with my emotions, needs and feelings when I choose my tea), I went on thinking about how I select the teas I buy (I know I have been dealing with this topic on some occasions on Teatrade but I would like to elaborate a little more).

When it comes to this, there are some basic schools: the “I only like a specific origin”, the “I only like teas that are blended with lemon” or the “let’s be adventurous and try to find something new.”

Obviously, you can add many more but I tried to gather all of them in a couple of big families.

If I had to define my style, I would go with the last one but with a slight twist, that allows me to be a bit idiosyncratic (since I first read it years ago, I always dreamt of using such a word). Some might say that I am a victim of our marketing times and I couldn’t agree less but I hope my selection process allows me to be something more than that.

But let’s get back on topic, me and my way of selecting the teas I buy.

First and foremost, the tea has to have an interesting name. Why a name? Because this is what attracts me first and foremost (hence the marketing victim).

What is an interesting name will you ask me. The answer is simple; one that allows me to travel in space and/or time, one that intrigues me. It changes from time to time as my interests are not always the same.

Then if it is a blend, I look at what is in it (mostly because I don’t like everything) and then smell it (although this is not mandatory as I don’t have a really good smell sense).

The ultimate step on my quest for a new tea is quite obvious: try it.

After getting to this point, you will tell me that this only works for blended teas and that for “pure” teas, I can’t and will probably never do it that way.

You are partly right (and then partly wrong) as I have certain preferences and although the names of the different gardens are sometimes an adventure by themselves, they can also be quite blunt.

However, let me tell you about three purchases I made during last year.

The first one (not in our normal spatio-temporal setting but in my memories) took place in Hamburg with our good friend @lahikmajoe. We went to a store I had never heard of that was full of Indian teas in bags and in bulk.

I came out of there with a bag of Darjeeling (obvious, no?) but from a garden named Bannockburn, which is a place in Scotland where the Scots fought and won against the English. Since I saw Braveheart, I had vivid pictures of this battle and of this place and upon seeing that name, my mind wandered and tried to create a link between the battle and the garden (for your information, I came up with one but I didn’t bother to look and check if I was right or wrong).

The second one (still in my memories) was bought in Norway.

I went to a nice shopping place (see there for my whole experience) and found this tea a China Moon Palace.

This name was so full of promises; imagine this what is a Moon Palace? And a Chinese one? Is it a mix of pagodas and the Forbidden City set on the Moon? Or something completely different? Again, I stopped there and didn’t fly to the Moon or play among the stars to see if I was right or wrong.

The power of this name was so strong and the smell was so nice that I bought a bag of it.

The last example was after these two events and took place on the Internet.

I was looking for an Oolong on the website of a company with good quality teas and I found one whose name would translate as Unique Leaf of the Phoenix (I am not sure if I translated right but I think you got the meaning).

I have a certain liking for odd and mythological beasts like the Phoenix (but also many others) and this is why I was attracted to this tea.

I don’t think it made me fly like a phoenix or that it will allow me to reborn from my ashes but after drinking it, I like its taste.

Now, you know a little more about how I proceed to select the teas I buy.

How do you do that? Am I the only one to have such a non standardised and personal selection process?

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

April 21, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Sometimes, you have to go back to another place you know well to find “new” and interesting things that you had previously missed.

I once spoke of loose leaf tea sold in a supermarket (see here) but I saw during this week an interesting concept in a hypermarket (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket): a true and dedicated teashop.

Not really dedicated since you can buy roasted coffee, spice and other specific sweets.

However, you can also buy almost 50 loose leaf teas (flavoured and not flavoured ; green, white or black) from a brand I could identify after making some research on Internet as being Compagnie Coloniale (http://www.compagnie-coloniale.com/).

This would be interesting per se but when looking at more information on this concept, I found an old article (from 2009) with an interview of the owner of this store with some pictures.

He was not asked why he had decided to do this but he said he wanted to make life easier for his customers.

Let’s look at it from a broader perspective.

Clermont-Ferrand is not from my point of view a really huge tea town and this hypermarket (since they are franchises, I cannot and won’t generalise) seems to focus on good quality yet affordable food products.

I think this is the key to this surprising marketing move: trying to broaden their market with this offering of tea but in a specialised and somehow different settings.

It is here that some of you might kill me for looking at this but I must say that they are still offering the usual bagged tea boxes but also a lot of loose leaf boxes of “classical” brands (you know those in the supermarkets near you).

What does this mean?

That with more space and a focus on the customers, even big stores (that are supposed to be non personal and so on and so on) can decide to upgrade the quality of their products, to increase the space available for their sales and to offer a complete range of products, increasing their attraction power and therefore their potential sales and profitability.

Can all the big stores go that way? I guess it depends on their strategy and how they perceive their market.

Can it work? If the market is not saturated by high quality teashops and if there is a demand (even if it is a small one) for such goods, I would say yes.

Does it work in making you buy more? It didn’t for me but only because they hadn’t what I was looking for and also because I know where to buy my teas (even if I am always ready for new things as long as they appeal to me). However for people discovering tea or without an access to good stores, the concept seems quite good and for me everything that allows more people to get access to quality teas is something worth noticing.

 

Tea retail business and the Great Captains: an intro

February 24, 2013 / / 13 Comments

L’Heure Gourmande by Adrian Scottow

Small tea business are like every other small business in the world. They face different challenges be it competitors, taxes, difficulties to find good suppliers… but they also have unique advantages in terms of their capacity to evolve, a peculiar relationship with their customers, the services they can provide.

This can be summarized in one sentence: small is beautiful but big is powerful.

One of the first decisions to make before launching a retail business (and tea is one of these) is what should be the focus or should I say the market for the future new company: should it try to provide everything (or nearly everything) or focus on a peculiar market (Japanese teas, home blended teas…)?

Some of you would object that this approach is quite academic and that usually people when starting a business don’t really know where they are heading or I would rather say, they don’t have a clear vision of what I just wrote about. They might have an unique expertise, some specific suppliers, a peculiar idea but for most of them (and I did write most of them), the idea is launching a business for different reasons.

This is exactly why I decided to write on this topic.

As usual, I won’t go too deeply in the topic as it is a mere introduction to something that I am sure has already been studied many times in different industries/fields.

What I want to do is provide a first look at these two alternatives and their pros and cons.

The “provide everything” approach as its name implies is a generalist approach which intents to give a little of something to everyone or to have every single need covered.

Pros

Covers every potential need

Focuses on a larger target market

Is more resilient to changes in trends

Cons

Higher competition from other companies

Differentiation from others is more difficult to achieve

Unable to answer the most precise needs of some customers

Table 1: Some pros and cons of a “provide everything” approach

The “focus, focus, focus” (the third focus being there to avoid any confusion with Hocus Pocus) approach is completely the opposite as it aims at being the best/only/… seller of a specific thing and be recognised for it.

Pros

Avoid direct competition with most people on the market

Recognised more easily for its expertise and unique approach

Higher value of the products sold or higher willingness of the customers to be more

Cons

Smaller market

More fragile when dealing with change in market trends

Linked with fewer suppliers

Table 2: Some pros and cons of a “focus, focus, focus” approach

I think most of the pros and cons can be understood quite easily so I will only comment a little more on two of them.

The first one is the trend parts.

If a company is surfing on the wave of the health benefit of green teas and selling only these teas ; it will have troubles to use what was its main selling argument when this trend “dies”.

And if it has nothing else to promote its products, it might be in dire straits.

On the other side, if it sells several products, it will have no problems surviving the different trends that rise and fall.

Obviously this simplification doesn’t work if you are talking about a trend that has been around for so long that it is something normal to most people in an area or in the world.

The second one is the higher value of the products sold or the willingness of the customers to pay more.

When a company is focusing on a product or a line of products, people recognise its expertise (I made the hypothesis that this company is knowledgeable about what it is doing) and are eager to pay more (probably a little more) for its products.

Why? Because deep inside us, we know that expertise has a price and that this price is worth it when expertise and quality go together. How do we know if they do? The first answer is by trying but we are also willing to believe more in the product quality when it is sold by someone knowledgeable in a topic.

Don’t tell me that it is the same as a salesman selling vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias as it is not. These people are sales experts not real vacuum cleaners experts. The good ones could sell you anything.

This is how this post ends but I am sure I missed something. So don’t hesitate to comment/discuss/correct me…

Napoléon on Saint Helena

What? I forgot something? The Great Captains?

No they didn’t all drink tea but they give a lot of thoughts to this being everywhere vs. focus problem and as always in military things, there was never a clear answer as it depended on a lot of things.