Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/123507
ISABEL ARBELAEZ L inda Neumann, owner of Washington, D.C.'s Teaism, regularly encounters an issue many of her industry colleagues can relate to. Her business is composed of a retail shop devoted to selling quality leaf and then four restaurants that sell brewed tea beside a variety of Asian-inspired dishes. The brand is built on tea, but successfully managing the flourishing company—which brought in nearly $5 million in revenue last year—involves lots of activity that is completely unrelated to Camellia sinensis. "I'll find myself in situations where the garbage disposal has to be fixed and we need a new freezer and I have to figure out healthcare reform," she says. "And then I say, 'Oh yeah, I've got to drink some tea.'" With all that goes into running a retail location or small tea business, tasting and exploring flavor nuance can unfortunately get left behind on a regular basis. Even maintaining proper inventory and freshness can be a major challenge as the inevitable business crises pop up. But like Teaism, most specialty tea businesses are built on a foundation of product expertise and perfectly prepared infusions—knowledge and taste are what separate specialty shops from everyone else. Here are some tips to help you and your staff stay up to date and enthused about all the leaf you offer, even as other aspects of the business pull at your attention. Your tea business is your baby, and especially when you're starting up, every decision and action can seem critical. But if you can take a deep breath and hand over some training and management responsibilities to proven staff members, you'll free up time to devote to tea-focused projects and give your employees a deeper level of training at the same time. "Your staff will be stronger and more self-sufficient if you give them a way to personally own that knowledge, to be keepers of the flame," says Suzette Hammond, manager of training and education at Milwaukee-based Rishi Tea. "Take some of the minutiae off your daily plate and allow evolution to happen." One example of a responsibility to be passed on: teaching intro-level tea classes to customers and staff. An owner or manager should devise the outline and run initial sessions, but once the kinks have been worked out, the classes can easily be handled by others. Connie Miller, who owns retailer ZenTea in Atlanta, says she has newer employees back her up as she teaches educational sessions, and the hands-on nature of the task helps them develop quickly to a point where they can start disseminating info themselves. "We don't have a formal manual or training procedure," Miller says. "It's more effective to have them experience tastings over and over." Many operators have also found that motivated employees can help take the lead on curating the business' list of offerings. They are often the ones seeing what excites customers the most, so they are well suited to choose the "next big thing" for the store. "You should feel confident letting them choose new, seasonal tea offerings, with an ear to what customers are interested ISABEL ARBELAEZ SHARE THE LOAD in," says Hammond. "Then let them conduct staff tastings when [the tea] comes in." DON'T BE AFRAID TO PARE DOWN Plenty of tea businesses put quantity front and center in their marketing, and though being able to say you have 200 different teas on offer may grab the attention of some customers, a bloated stock will do little to keep patrons coming back if they run into a lack of freshness or tea lists that just seem unwieldy. At Teaism, Neumann says she and her business partner have kept a fairly slim roster ever since they opened in 1996. They carry continued on page 40 freshcup.com May 2013 39