Behind the Scenes with Jesse
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Hello Tea Friends,
Mickey here! Exciting things have been happening at Jesse's Teahouse lately, and everyone certainly has lots of questions about it. Myself included!
I recently had the chance to chat with Jesse about how things have been going behind the scenes. Now that all the warehouses are starting to open up, I thought it would be fun to share the notes with everyone!
I hope you enjoy this little interview, as there was certainly a lot to talk about.
(My questions are in bold, and Jesse's responses follow.)
I'll start with the most burning question I think we all have: Will there be price increases to teas or teaware, since the company is now running more warehouses?
- We hope prices will stay the same! Different countries have different local sales taxes, so your price may include local VAT at checkout, but there will be no additional import and customs fees in any market.
This also protects us from trade instability caused by tariffs, since if laws change and additional taxes or tariffs are added, those price increases will likely only impact the country that raises the taxes, and no other markets.
That's great! Will this affect the price of the subscription box in any way?
- The subscription box will be the same price in all markets! The main difference is that CA, EU, and UK customers will have their subscription filled from their own region, meaning faster, cheaper shipping, and no import duties, just normal VAT.
How will the new warehouses affect shipping and fulfillment? (Times, costs, customs fees)
- The new warehouses will mean your tea is always in your own region before you place your order. It means faster shipping to you, no international shipping charges, and no customs fees. We pay all the customs fees at the border when importing the goods, and those fees are in the price of the product already.
Managing four regions will be a challenge for our team, so we may have some out-of-stock products from time to time, but we will be able to improve this situation when we know who is buying what in which market, and can adjust.
How are restock times for the new warehouses? Are they worse, or better?
- Going forward, we plan on restocking all the warehouses once a quarter on a regular schedule, so restocks should come regularly!
I know that with any business, importing items to new places can be difficult. Will any of the products be more expensive to purchase from different warehouses, due to the costs of stocking them, or will it be an average across the board?
- Right now, we are hoping that we can keep all prices the same across the markets, even though our prices of shipping to the smaller markets are higher right now since we are at a smaller scale.
In the meantime, as a way of appreciating our first customers in CA, UK and EU, we are just taking less profit from these markets while we see if this is sustainable.
Speaking of importing, will all products eventually be available across all stores?
- We are working to get more products added to all the stores, but in the short term we will likely have more teas available in the US and Canadian warehouses, since the import rules there are more similar to the USA, and getting all of our teas compliance paperwork for the EU and UK is very expensive.
We plan as time goes on to stock more EU/UK-compliant teas, which means new teas are likely to be launched in all markets together going forward!
That sounds challenging! What is more difficult to stock in the new warehouses?
- Right now, the biggest reason for EU and UK teas being harder to stock has to do with costly pesticide testing compliance, as well as regulations making it difficult to ship tea by ocean freight.
This means we need to sell a lot of each tea in order to make back the costs of doing the EU-specific pesticide tests, which means we can only stock teas we plan on selling for a long time going forward, as well as best-sellers.
We've heard bits and pieces about the process through your different social media platforms, but we want to know the whole story! What was the process of opening the EU and UK warehouses like for you?
- It was a big learning process! I had never worked in Europe or the UK before, so I had to adjust to a lot of new systems and learn a lot of new laws. It wound up taking a lot more time than I expected, but also the response from the online followers was bigger than expected, so I am super excited that everything has turned out great!
Glad to hear it! I know these things often take quite some time. How long has this been in the works behind the scenes?
- A long time - I started the process of researching how we could do this in February of 2024. So it took well over a year between when we started and when we opened. It wound up being a huge task for myself, my assistant Marissa, and both Claire and Alex from the China team, as well as Gerard, our back-end website manager, and we had a lot of help from David, a follower from Germany, who helped us with all the labels. So it’s been a lot of work, and I am glad to see the warehouses open!
Why do all of the teas now come with nutritional labels? I've noticed them on all of my newer teas.
- Local laws require labeling for all products in multiple languages, so we designed one label that has the product name as well as other info that is needed, like the address and phone number of the “responsible third party” we hired to represent us in the EU and UK.
Shout out to David Kuhrmann, a follower and supporter of the channel, for helping us edit and render the labels, so that our team in China could print them out and sticker our products.
Apologies if the label messes up the pretty packaging - I assure you we wish we didn’t need to cover up our own designs, but I want to make sure to follow the rules!
Since Jesse’s Teahouse is expanding, would you ever consider a physical storefront?
- I would love to! Unfortunately, as everyone knows, rent is expensive, and running a storefront takes a lot of time, energy, and love. I travel too much to manage a spot like that in the way I would want, and hiring a store manager means the shop just got even more expensive to run.
One day I would love to have a teahouse/comedy club and do tea events in the day and comedy shows at night. But I also believe there is real value in the “online” teahouse, since I think this community is really special and there is not another one of its size and type online right now. So even though I would love an in-person store, I think the investment in the warehouses makes more sense for more people, since it will allow everyone to get better tea, and then we can do one-off events in different cities around the world, rather than have one club where we pay rent every day of the year.
This is part one of two in this little series! I hope you'll join me next time when Jesse talks about some of his more personal experiences in Europe. As always, if you want to come hang out in the Discord (and throw more questions at the team!) you can find it here.
Until next time! Happy steeping.
-Mickey