Head of tea experience Eduardo Molina pouring tastes of P&T’s signature welcome teas. Photo credit: P&T
Adroitly attract new customers to specialty by arousing their desire to experience tea
Tea is widely known but not deeply understood. Experiential tea retailers are vital to transforming casual tea drinkers into informed enthusiasts. They play a crucial role in raising awareness about the diverse world of tea, its health benefits, and the significant impact of fair wages for those in the tea industry.
Experiential Tea Retail
Paper & Tea (P&T) emerged from the pandemic with vigor, opening 28 new stores since 2022, to total 34 in nine countries. Achieving the exhilarating and exhausting endeavor of bringing new people to tea.
Eduardo Molina, head of tea experience at P&T, explains, “Our main idea, when somebody steps into one of our stores, is for customers to live an experience they will always remember – an experience they will share with others.”
When we spoke, Molina had recently cut the ribbon at P&T’s store in Bruges, Belgium. Molina, 37, a professional sommelier and former tea educator at the Chilean Tea Academy, trains the staff on how to attract curious passersby to the tea bar at the company’s state-of-the-art stores.
A highly refined sales choreography does the rest.
Molina says the minimalist fixtures and sophisticated lighting “attract someone who likes pretty things, somebody with a certain level of curiosity.”
“We are not a place only for tea drinkers. We believe we can create new tea drinkers. We want people to walk into the store, and even if they don’t drink tea, they will soon start because they feel that the atmosphere is so nice that they want to be part of it,” he says.
The centerpiece of each store is a tea bar. “I know, I know, having a place to taste tea is not a groundbreaking idea,” says Molina, “but how we present the tea is different. I describe it as “very deliberate.”
“People must experience tea. It doesn’t matter how beautiful our website is; you must smell it and taste it. And that’s the reason why we’re opening stores.
“People have come to me and said, ‘Paper and Tea must be doing pretty well because you’re opening so many stores.’
“No, no, we’re not doing well. Yet. We have an idea. We have a commitment,” says Molina. “We are basically building the plane while we’re flying, we’re still creating new concepts, and there are still a lot of standards to be established, which can be seen, of course, as a downside. But on the other hand, for somebody who has the energy to create something from scratch, it’s also very motivational,” he said.
P&T demonstrates, “we attract people with the whole design of our stores, which are foremost very inviting, very warm, very welcoming.”
The “welcome” teas customized for each location play a big part in convincing conventional tea drinkers. What makes these teas effective “occurs with the body’s sensors – when smelling something you haven’t smelled in a while, smelling something that reminds you of a moment you lived in the past, or tasting something you have never tasted,” says Molina.
So, where do you find these teas?
Experiential tea retailer Camellia Sinensis in Montreal explains how merchants can collaborate with growers to craft teas to exceed consumer expectations in every kind of market.
Collaborate to exceed consumer expectations
Experiential retailers find it challenging to discover new and exciting teas that are reasonably priced and in sufficient quantities to return a profit.
Consumer surveys and panels provide clues, but the most relevant preferences are evident in dollars spent at the point of sale. Retailers must constantly monitor ever-changing consumer behavior. Databased decision-making is highly refined in the age of computers, but store traffic, sales data, and inventory turn can only measure popularity of existing inventory.
Camellia Sinensis is a 25-year-old omnichannel tea retail marketer and wholesaler headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Co-owners assemble the company’s catalog of 200 teas annually after visiting suppliers on three continents. Understanding what tea drinkers prefer is second nature, but finding suppliers with the perfect tea to quench that thirst is time-consuming and expensive, and best done in person.
The entry halls at planter’s homes display guest books signed by famous retailers such as Sir Thomas Lipton, a grocer, attesting to the importance of visiting tea estates with an eye for what sells.
What would happen if retailers invested up front in the process, helping build factories equipped to make dozens of teas? Instead of hoping and waiting, merchants could collaborate with growers to produce teas that please at price points supported by existing customers.
In 2015, Camellia Sinensis partially financed the Tea Studio project in India’s Nilgiri Hills to find out. Co-founder and director Kevin Gascoyne was there from the conception and developed the mandate with his long-term friend Indi Khanna.
Given sufficient time, measured in years, not months, and resources, calculated in double-digit dollars per pound at the farmgate — tea growers can produce virtually any style in scalable quantities.
“The small artisanal factory has allowed The Studio to explore various angles of the tea industry. As tea enthusiasts and tasters, it is their laboratory for experimentation and development. It gives them much deeper access to the relationship between the artisanal process and the final flavor profile,” says Gascoyne.
As merchants, Camellia Sinensis now offers teas they have developed over time to suit their clients’ tastes and then retail them at a reasonable price.
Khanna and Gascoyne are industry leaders who genuinely desire to present a more sustainable option to the struggling, traditional plantations.
Gascoyne writes, “Tea Studio offers a functional alternative that breaks even in the real world without outside financing.” He said that the model presents a fresh look at producing tea while respecting the workforce, the environment, and the end client, which they hope will be a model for the future.
Collaborations are ideal for sourcing the teas consumers find most enticing.