Her mission is to make it easier for people to drink good tea, while educating people that tea doesn't actually come from Yorkshire.
Eureka Moment
Travelling around South Asia led me to become immersed in the region's chai culture. Returning to the UK a few years later, I decided to train as a tea sommelier and learnt that there was a bad side to the tea industry. This was the "aha" moment. I discovered a wide scale lack of transparency and that industrial-scale farming was leaving its impact on the land and the communities where tea is grown and there is little awareness of this. Believing that tea can be grown and sold in a better way, I quit my day job, and so Karma Tea Co. was born.
Finance
Karma Tea is a self-funded project, financed only with revenue and my own personal equity. Working long hours and living off savings is very challenging as I'm competing with bigger companies that have deeper pockets and can spend much more on marketing.
Regrets
There have been more challenges than "regrets". Tea is a very well established market, and in the UK there is already an engrained tea culture meaning that consumers don't change their drinking habits very quickly. Consumers are also used to paying very little for tea. Changing the mindset about tea drinking takes time, and patience. It's certainly not a business which you can enter and expect to make a profit quickly.
What would you have changed?
I spent at least a year developing the brand and strategy behind Karma Tea. In hindsight I should have got to market much quicker to test my products. I also launched too many different types of teas all at once instead of focusing on promoting a core range. As a result, I incurred higher marketing costs which could have been reduced if I kept to a smaller range.
For more information visit Karma Tea
