Read the rest of the article here…

29/130 Doc Ngu street, Vinh Phuc precinct, Ba Dinh district, Hanoi, Vietnam

Tel: +84 4 62967532

Fax: +84 4 37625830

Email: minhdangtic@vnn.vn; minhdangtic@gmail.com

Business: Producing and exporting tea

We all love to hear moving stories and Aina Notoa‘s story of how Gr8 Women evolved is no exception.  I’m truly privileged to be invited to speak about my tea journey from the UK to Australia on Tuesday March 29th and look forward to sharing the stage with Jenni Madison, founder of Coconut Magic, and Leanne Fabila, founder of Tahiti Spirit.

I created the Queensland Business Facebook Group as a forum for business owners to ask questions, assist others and to seek out collaborative opportunities.  Little did I know that a collaborative opportunity was brewing (guffaw) in the form of the group’s first social gathering for business owners.  The 3M’s (myself, Michael Tucker and Maree Brodie) are having another casual meet and greet on Friday April 1st (without the April Fool jokes of course) for small business owners of Queensland.

My next collaboration is with business owners in the health and wellness industry.  I’m delighted to be sharing the stage with Chris Tuck, Jenni Madison again, and Nadine Piat-Niski.  If you’d like to bring a little bit of health and well-being back into your life, whether it’s through incorporating a fitness regime, a cup of tea, coconut oil or by coaching, there’s something for everyone.  The seminar takes place on Tuesday April 5th and to grab an early bird ticket, please register before March 31st.

I feel like I’ve come full circle because after my first tea-tasting collaboration, I’m going to be working with Lucy again from 16th on Park.  This time we’re holding the first in a series of tea pairing classes, starting with tea and desserts.  You can imagine how hard it was for Lucy and I to carry out the research for this workshop (ahem!) but we’re absolutely delighted to introduce three fabulous desserts with three wonderful teas.  Book your place by giving one of us a call: Tea Pairing with Desserts Sunday 10th April 2-4pm

Who are you going to be collaborating with this  year?

Seems like every tea (and coffee) merchant these days is pushing “green:” Fair Trade and organic. Sustainable sources. Recyclable (or recycled) packaging.

These are business people who, one presumes, want to make a living selling their products. So one must also presume that they are offering these “earth-friendly” items because that’s what their customers want to buy.

But is this what consumers really want? Is it a purely emotional issue, or is there hard evidence to back it up?

Recently a member of my Teamail group asked for my help polling members on this very subject. The member wanted some reliable statistics for an in-the-works book. It’s a timely and important topic, so I posted a poll with questions about “eco-friendly” tea, and invited members to respond. 89 of them did, and added to the 64 who responded to the aforementioned member via another venue, approximately 150 tea and coffee consumers expressed their opinions on the subject. Granted that this is not a huge sampling, but the participants represent a very targeted group. Here is a breakdown of the questions (each starts with an arrow –>), which represent a wide spectrum of perspective, and the responses, in percentages (%):

–> I am careful to buy Fair Trade and organic teas, and only in eco-friendly packaging or take-out cups, preferably in an environment created with green or recycled materials. These issues are very important to me and I’m happy that tea sellers finally “get it” — I’m even willing to pay extra for these amenities: 2%

–> I much prefer to buy Fair Trade and organic teas from an eco-friendly vendor. While these issues are important to me, they are not the sole criterion for my purchasing decisions: 21%

–> If I have a choice I prefer Fair Trade and organic tea from an eco-friendly seller, but these criteria are not as important to me as taste, quality, price, and good customer service: 21%

–> I buy tea based on taste, quality, price, and customer service. If the tea happens to be Fair Trade and organic, the packaging or environment are eco-friendly and made of sustainable materials, that’s a bonus: 38%

–> I buy tea based on taste, quality, price, and customer service. I don’t really care if the tea is Fair Trade and organic, or if the packaging or take-out cups are made from sustainable materials: 3%

–> I buy tea based on taste, quality, price, and customer service. Period. The rest of it really doesn’t matter to me: 11%

–> I have no idea (so I guess I really don’t care) what Fair Trade, organic, eco-friendly, and sustainable have to do with tea. I just buy what I like!: 2%

–> I buy tea based on taste, quality, price, and customer service. I avoid “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” stuff because they really add nothing to the tea except for increasing the price: 1%

–> I specifically do not buy Fair Trade, organic, green, eco-friendly, or “sustainable” tea or anything else. I think it’s all a scam, and that the people who “certify” these products need to get real jobs in the real world: 1%

So after eliminating the 2% with strong opinions on either end of the discussion, we have 80% of consumers expressing various levels of interest in “green” products — but who are not willing to go out of their way, or pay extra, for it. And another 16% for whom the topic is barely on the radar.

What does this mean for the tea industry — to owners of tea businesses, and to prospective owners? Is “eco” just a fad, part and parcel to the discredited “global warming” scares? Based on these numbers, it seems to me that a business’ capital would be better spent on teas that taste good and are competitively priced, and top-notch customer service, than on spoons made from corn or other “eco” hype.

From growers, wholesalers, and retailers, to packaging manufacturers, to marketers, the tea and coffee industries seem to have a lot invested in “eco,” and I imagine there will be plenty of readers with opinions about the information presented here. Obviously my conclusions and views are not the last words on the subject. You’re welcome to leave your comments — please keep them civil and non-commercial.

And to put any rumours to the contrary to rest, my family and I live in a house devoid of cathedral ceilings and hot tubs, use energy-saving appliances and thermal draperies, and always turn out the lights when we leave a room. We recycle everything our local recycling centre accepts. Additionally, we grow a large garden and orchard which we enrich with cow manure and kitchen wastes (especially eggshells and spent tea leaves); all uncultivated land is left to natural woods and native plant growth. And we feed and house birds, too. So there!

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Today I read an very good post by Diane Walden over at T Ching all about how much the specialty tea business is growing here in the United States.  She sites the success big players like Argo, Adagio, and Teavana.  Ms. Walden furthers her argument by also writing about other small -but successful- specialty stores that can be found in growing numbers all over the country.

Adagio retail store Naperville, IL. (Image via Agagio Teas).

Reading this post got me to thinking.  I’m going to try to explain my thoughts here…

~My Thoughts~

I remembered watching films from the 1970s (my favorite decade when it comes to films), and noticing that whenever characters are drinking coffee, nine times out of ten they are drinking it from a mug.  The remainder of the time, the characters are drinking their coffee out of a generic to-go cup.

So what?

So this: The now ever-present Starbucks logo was totally absent.  Ms. Walden talks about Starbucks in her post, and she states that they did not really find their mojo until the 1980s. If my own memory serves correctly, the specialty / gourmet coffee craze did not really get moving until the 1990s, the era of grunge music, both of which happened to come from the crazed city of Seattle.

I think of coffee in the United States in the following terms…

• Before Starbucks
• After Starbucks

Is it possible that something similar could happen to tea? Could a tea version of Starbucks arise, or will a company like Starbucks or McDonald’s take over one of the growing and successful emerging tea retailers?

Ms. Walden writes,

Chicago has been a hotbed/center of successful U.S. retail loose-leaf tea store concepts, including TeaGschwendner‘s, Argo‘s, and, most recently, large online retailer Adagio‘s.  New York has seen the Argo chain come to town and TeaGschwendner recently moved into a tiny space in Rockefeller Center.  What concepts are working best in terms of potential growth into the kind of dominance that a few coffee chains hold in their niche?

For whatever it’s worth I hope tea will not suffer (I use that word suffer very deliberately) the same fate as the coffee.  I say suffer because even though chains like Starbucks, Caribou, and Second Cup have really taken off in the coffee market, it has been at the cost of so many small -and unique- Ma & Pa coffee shops.

Image via Brandon at Wrong Fu Cha

Currently there are very few small Tea Houses near where I live, but there are a few, and those few are all unique.  I like the uniqueness of those places.  I don’t want there to be a Baltar’s Tea House (or whatever) near every Starbucks.  I’d rather have the variety of many different small tea houses.

(Points to you if you get my awesome Battlestar Galactica reference about Gaius Baltar).

~End Note~

Ms. Walden writes regularly for T Ching, and her opinions on the tea industry are all worth a read.  In addition to writing about tea, she has started two tea businesses, one of which is a specialty tea house called The California Tea & Coffee Brewery.  You can also follow her on Twitter @CA_Tea.

I’m also in the planning stages of carrying out further tea-tasting events at the following venues:

1. Espressimo Café originally started out as an independent coffee shop. Now serving tea from MayKingTea on a Sunday to accompany their wonderful breakfast menu, Nina and her team have a variety of teas from China, Sri Lanka and Italy to tickle your taste buds.
2. Violet Cakes originally started out as a market stall selling cup cakes in the ever popular Broadway Market. Claire’s shop  on Wilton Way is proving popular with their Facebook Fans and the locals.  Violet Cakes has a large variety of teas from MayKingTea as well as some teas of her own, including mint from Claire’s own garden. 
3. Back 2 Balance is a practice based in Walthamstow which specialises in running classes on Yoga, Pilates, Physiotherapy and other complimentary therapies.  Understanding the health benefits of tea, Karen is looking to running tea-tasting events with MayKingTea starting with Wednesday October 20th and plans to sell teas from MayKingTea in the near future.

Yoga has managed to elude me all these years but as I’m getting older, I can certainly see the benefit of developing a set of breathing exercises and enhancing one’s posture.  Yoga was also a first for me and I thoroughly enjoyed my first session with Shaktiprem. It wasn’t too strenuous, I could feel the stretches from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and it was a great way to start my Sunday.

After the Yoga class we were led to our table where we had a healthy breakfast: a wonderful selection of fruits, followed by poached eggs on rye bread. After breakfast I decided to introduce our fellow yoga students to two of my teas: High Mountain Oolong from Nantou, Taiwan and Lung Ching (or Dragonwell) from Zhejiang, China.

It made sense after breakfast to tempt the students with the High Mountain Oolong first of all, as oolong is purported to be great for digestion. It was certainly a winner with everyone: a delicate tea with apricot undertones, with a lovely aftertaste. The best thing about this tea is that the aroma lends itself into the taste. After trying the oolong, I prepared the Lung Ching and it was great to hear the student’s reactions when they tasted my Lung Ching the way green tea should taste. Finally, I asked the students which tea they preferred and made them a proper cuppa, with the leaves swirling around in their tea cup so that they could appreciate the beauty of the leaves as they enjoyed each sip.

For a pictorial representation of the tea-tasting, make sure you click on the Flikr photos on the right.

It was really encouraging that some of the students wanted to know more about my tea-tastings and once my tea-tools finally arrive from the UK (it’s currently on a container ship making its way to Australia), I can’t wait to start MayKingTea in Brisbane. 

Want to be in the know about our tea-tasting classes? Drop us an email and we’ll be in touch very soon.

I’d like to thank Shaktiprem for starting me on my Yoga journey and to Lucy, for providing such a wonderful venue and breakfast. May we have many more collaborations in the future.

I think the worst thing I had to throw away was my personal tea collection.  Australia has very strict laws about foodstuffs and after several unsuccessful telephone calls and unclear websites, we found out a couple of days before the shipping company was due to come and pack up our things, that tea was actually permissable (apart from the flowering teas – which I gave to the removal men’s WAGs), by which point I had already decided to throw away some of the teas.  However I did give a lot of my tea away much to the delight of some of my friends and family )

As we only had six weeks to prepare for the move, it seemed unlikely that I would find someone to take over the market stalls that I had been running at Whitecross Street Market and Pattern Market on Kingsland Road, however there will be an opportunity for customers to purchase the tea in several locations in London in the near future.  In the meantime, the following outlets have teas from MayKingTea on their beverages menu which you might wish to try:

1. Espressimo Café originally started out as an independent coffee shop. Now serving tea from MayKingTea on a Sunday to accompany their wonderful breakfast menu, Nina and her team have a variety of teas from China, Sri Lanka and Italy to tickle your taste buds.

2. Violet Cakes originally started out as a market stall selling cup cakes in the ever popular Broadway Market. Now Claire has a shop  on Wilton Way and is proving popular with their Facebook Fans and customers.  Violet Cakes has a large variety of teas from MayKingTea including mint tea from her garden. 

I’d like to thank all of my customers for supporting me in the last six months.  For those of you based in the UK, you will still be able to purchase my teas online but if there are any teas that are not currently listed on my website do drop me a Tea-mail (info@maykingtea.com) as I may be able to find the right tea for you.

For those of you who’d like daily updates on the developments of MayKingTea and how I’m getting on in Australia, you may wish to follow me on Twitter.

Marketing for Startups is FREE –Social Media shouldn’t be poo-poo’d, especially as it’s free marketing, and start-ups should invest a little time to branding themselves online.  I’ve often asked the question to fellow networkers why we buy products and services from bigger companies.  Their answers are often because they trust the brand, the products are outstanding, and they share the same values. So how is anyone in the online community going to buy from a little known company, such as MayKingTea? This is where marketing comes in.  Social Media can help to establish a long-term marketing strategy to get your name/brand out there, when you’re known to people, hopefully they’ll like what you write, they’ll start to trust you and when that trust is established they will buy from you at a later stage.  Social Media can help you to establish that trust amongst strangers, who might become customers.

A Long Term Strategy – Just like networking you’re not going to make money overnight.  It’s all about developing a relationship with your customers, potential business folk you can collaborate with and even vendors.  A few vendors have found me on Twitter but rather than sell to me straight away they created a dialogue with me and found the right opportunity to sell to me.  For those that sold to me immediately, I was put off by them straight away and your marketing strategy on Social Media should be exactly the same.

Your Opportunity to Shine –I’ve already talked about becoming a brand and why that’s important to your business, but how do we do that?  One of the ways is to establish yourself as an expert in your field.  Social Media is about giving useful content to your global community so for MayKingTea, I would Tweet about articles I’ve read in the press or useful blog posts that other tea folk have written, invoke discussions via discussion groups on Linked In or comment on other people’s blogs.  By establishing yourself as an expert your customers will come to trust and respect your brand and in time will buy from you.

Knowledge Sharing – As well as sharing knowledge in your expert field, you have to remember that you are a person and so there has to be a balance between me as a tea expert and me as May King Tsang so don’t forget to share the social aspect to your life too.  For me, I talk about politics, I am a great enthusiast for technology and I love food so I retweet about Twitter, Social Media and gadgets.  Anything that is promoting something local, I will retweet that too.  But just like when you speak to someone in person, remember to thank people if they’re retweeted your tweets or suggested you as a #FollowFriday.

Innocent Speak – Who’s heard of Innocent Smoothies?  They had the best marketing strategy so much so that big corporations have tried to do the same.  Remember the banana phone?  The plain talking is now being adopted by corporate companies and some of them are doing it badly.  In fact big companies are recruiting marketing strategists who can talk ‘innocent speak’.  Big companies are trying to use Twitter – some of them doing badly and some of them doing well.  Audi for example asked people’s opinion for what should go in the next car and prospective customers responded. Honda, however, bombarded their followers with “Look at our latest model”.  Audi was applauded and rewarded for their campaign as their sales went up on their next model, Honda was slated.  So remember to be yourself on Social Media: do the straight talking and don’t pretend to be anyone you’re not.  Write like you’re speaking with someone.

Not sure? Ask! The best way to engage with your community is to start a dialogue by asking questions.  Engage in a conversation via Facebook and Twitter.  Ask a question in the discussion groups in Linked In.  By showing you’re human and that you don’t know everything there is to know in your field, it’s a way of putting a human face to a brand.  It’s human nature to want to help and if you like a brand or someone, they’d be more than happy to assist.

Google Rankings – Who would like to be at the top of the organically grown part of a Google search?  It was through my constant activity online that allowed me to be in the privileged position that my website is at the top of Google and all the other major search engines.  To do this, make sure you write articles on MeetnLink, comment on other people’s articles, add friends on MeetnLink.  As well as the MeetnLink website, make sure you write articles and add them to your website, or to places such as Ezine articles.  I’ve joined many discussion groups on Linked In and added comments to other people’s discussions.  I’ve started my own discussions.  I’ve written on other people’s blogs, started my own blog.  Taking pictures and posting them on your website, your blog, and places like Twitpic and Flikr is also important (make sure your pictures have a meaningful title, the keywords are really important).  Putting videos on YouTube and incorporating those into your website and/blog, get press releases written and publish those online for free.  And don’t worry about getting the videos professionally done, the majority of videos posted on YouTube are home made.  Some of my tweets on Twitter also appear on Google once I’ve searched for MayKingTea. 

Twitter – People always say to me they never have time for Twitter, but did you know that you can send an SMS to Twitter?  So if you don’t have internet capability on your phone you can sms to 86444.  People have also said to me, “I don’t know what to Tweet about”.  You can tweet about anything!!  I’ve seen things in the street that have been interesting, heard interesting conversations.  I’ve Tweeted about interesting people and their businesses I’ve met at networking meetings.  Taken pictures whilst on public transport of beautiful things, tea that I’ve drank, afternoon tea experiences, displays of  my market stall. Remember you’re trying to build you as a person and as a brand online so that people can get to know you, so imagine having a conversation with someone and then Tweet about it.  Self promotion should only constitute about 10% of your tweets (90% conversation) maximum, I’ve been told.  The rest of the time should be useful content and things that people might find interesting.  Don’t forget the importance of hashtags in order to categorise your tweets.  Some companies or followers will pick up on your hashtags and will want to follow you once you’ve talked about a certain subject, although it’s not a numbers game.  So don’t feel bad if you only have a large number of followers.  It’s better to have 300 followers, 90% of whom are your customers/vendors/businesses to do joint ventures with rather than have 3000 followers and only 5% fall in the same category.

E-Networking – I’ve already talked about the different aspects of Social Media.  For me, I had a strategy that I wanted all of my teas to be sourced from a garden that I know about within two years, but with the power of Social Media, 65% of my teas I know the gardens of where they come from.  Vendors have been in touch and if I’ve liked their product, I know their story, that they’re a small tea grower; I’ve incorporated their teas into my collection.  I’ve also learnt a great deal from networking online.  There’s always plenty to learn about tea and there’s many experts out there that I’ve tapped into in order to improve my knowledge of tea.  As well as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, don’t forget to keep up the relationships online, keep up the relationship on MeetnLink or other networking sites you’ve signed up to.

And Keep It Up – Remember that you have to make time for Social Media.  It can be addictive but be very strict in how much time you’re going to spend on it.  For me personally, my strategy starts when I wake up.  Catch up on emails and up to an hour on Social Media in the morning.  And last thing at night before I go to bed.  If I’m travelling on the bus or train to a meeting, I might find the time then also.  I often break my rules, and that’s something you have to be careful with.  In the last couple of weeks, my online activity has gone down a little bit, partly because I have a temporary phone which doesn’t have a lot of functionality, and now in Google, my website doesn’t appear right at the top anymore, which means I’ll need to work harder in order to put that back right up to the top again.  So be aware that if your online productivity goes down, then your Google rankings will also go down too.

How I came to start a business in tea is a really funny story.  I’ve been drinking tea since I was yay high (imagine me indicating my height with my left hand ) but just like everyone else, I was probably drinking the not so great stuff.  Jasmine tea that was loose leaf but probably scented with jasmine essence rather than scented with the real flowers; drinking Pu’erh in Chinese restaurants when ordering Dim Sum on a Sunday but none of the lovely aged cooked stuff that I’m accustomed to now.

A very good friend of mine asked me to go into business with him, to open up, wait for it, a coffee house )  But a coffee house with art evenings such as film showings, poetry readings, talks by artists, that kind of thing.  We did a bit of research and I reluctantly went into a Starbucks coffee house to check out the competition.  I had to call my husband up to find out from him what coffee I ought to drink!  And when I looked at the tea menu, all they had were tea-bag herbal infusions, and that was when I had my eureka moment.  It wasn’t a coffee house I was interested in but a tea-house! 

I went back to my friend and impressed on him about the tea-house idea.  He loved it, and we refined our research.  As time went on we realised that our visions for the tea-house were quite different and so we went our separate ways but he’s still a very good friend of mine, and that’s how I came into the world of tea.

So that was, I guess my first lesson I learned in business.  You can’t go into a business if you’re not passionate about the product or service.  If you go into a business purely to make money,  many authors will tell you that the business is probably doomed to fail.

One day, she thought of making a tea company and subsequently decided to spend all her savings on 60,000 cans of tea packaged by an Indonesian company. At that point, she had no idea how to sell her products. She thought she could just make a website and people would buy her products off the Internet.

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out the way she expected – in 2006, Tea District sales totaled just $8,000. However, she did not despair over the number. She was determined to make a breakthrough. In mid-2006, she attended the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas and developed 40 products upon her return. Since then, she traveled non-stop 450 days going to shows, some of which lasted for 8 days.

During the shows, she would stand for 9 hours sampling tea to visitors who came by her booth. In 2007, she sampled 40,000 cups of tea and in 2008, she doubled the number. After working so hard for a long time, sales climbed to $102,000 in 2007 and projected $350,000 in 2009.

Lesson learned: if working for someone else don’t work for you, and you are determined to be your own boss, try starting a business…

Sailor Boatman Alfred Hsing

Wushu
Gave Travis a call and went to check out an open gym at White Lotus with Eliver on Thurs. It was fun and I did some tricking. I learned some parkour and more flashy kicks like a nara bang and a wall flip.

Friday was Suzy’s send off at Nick’s apartment / streets of Alhambra. Dennis swung by and picked me up. It was good catching up and then we had a few drinks at Nicks place. David had his crazy Oregon games and we played ‘fugitive’ or I forget the name.. but some game where you chase down people like cops and robbers but over a 3-5 block radius. I was tired and buzzed, but it was a fun game.

Sat and Sun I had private lessons. It’s pretty fun teaching people, especially when they are willing to learn and serious about training. I just need to get everyone in on a routine so that we get on a roll and that momentum from a good practice rolls over to larger improvements the following class. I want to keep my private lessons to a few people at the moment since I am preparing for Worlds and would rather focus on my own training aside from current 2-3 lessons. Everyone has been awesome! So basically my training on Sat and Sun consisted of warming up and demonstrating some kicks.

Film
It was the Last official shoot date for me on the documentary/pilot this Sunday. I dressed up as a sailor, a pirate, and other random outfits for a green screen shoot. It was so ridiculous I cant even talk about it all. In any case, it feels good that the first complete episode should be done filming by the end of the week. I will have to go back in to do some voiceovers and snap a few pick ups possibly.

Entrepreneurial
Tea- Spent all Sat really cleaning up and prepping the site. Went to Wells Fargo to open a merchant account.

Clothing- Really delayed. I havent heard back from our pattern maker and also my partner is launching a really big (and to be fair very exciting) food truck business so his attention is not on our clothing at the moment. I’m hoping that after all the launches and he has his staff hired to start serving the food that things will slightly calm down and we can regain some steam on this project… but I think things are just going to keep growing and building up on the food truck that I doubt things will slow down.

WushuKicks- Going to test the success of the Tea site and see if everything works smoothly there, then maybe I can transition WK to the same platform.

Misc
Car died on Thurs/Fri. It wouldnt even start when I tried to jump it.. so I assumed the starter needed to be replaced. I was quite bummed. I finally got it in to the shop and they determined it was actually just a really really beat battery with no charge capacity left in it… so I got a new battery and now the G starts up right away.

Aside from it being my LAST shoot date for the documentary project, it is also my LAST week at work. I had an exit interview today and will be cleaning out my desk and turning in my badge on Friday. I am very excited for what’s to come.

Some goals/thing to focus on after I quit will be:
Wushu training for World Games
Ninja Warrior Audition
Tea team, distribution, expansion
Completion of clothing product
3 Private Lessons a week
SAG Extra Work
Pasadena Real Estate
WushuKicks Site Revamp