Waking up to 2014

Well, it’s 2014, indeed well into 2014, and I thought it high tide I updated you on all things PostTEA. Towards the end of 2013 we achieved some remarkable things, and it’s time to share a few of them.

1) It was a Crazy Christmas!

Hurrrrrah for that! It was much crazier than I could ever have imagined, especially for a new startup that’s still finding its feet! As PostTea is still just a team of one (although I hope to change that soon) Christmas was a little bit manic, especially as I’m still holding done a part time job. I think there was a three week period at the end of November that I didn’t sleep for more than four hours a night. Being an Events Manager and a small business owner at Christmas did not combine well, but I made it out smiling!

2) We received Start Up Funding from Smarta!

Well, this was a biggie!! I’ve followed Smarta on social media for a while, and attended one of their small business events in London, so when they popped up as provider for the government’s Start Up Loan scheme, I knew partnering with Smarta would be a wise move. Of course, the end of November (whilst elbow deep in Tea Advent Calendars…) was not the best time to be submitting detailed financial statements and business plans, but I scraped something together and headed off to meet the wonderful Smarta team in London. I emerged an hour later with the biggest smile imaginable and enjoyed a lovely glass of bubbly with the other half. For now, I’ll leave the details there, but I’m planning another post about what this funding will mean for the development of PostTEA.

3) We won Jacqueline Gold’s Women on Wednesday award on Twitter.

About two years ago, Jacqueline launched a campaign to support women in business called Women On Wednesday, or #WOW, which takes place every Wednesday and is run through Jacqueline’s twitter page. Each week Jacqueline encourages female business owners to tweet her using the #WOW hash tag along with their business name and a short overview of what they do. Jacqueline then picks her three top entries for that week and re-tweets them to her followers (currently over 38,000).

When selecting the three winners, Jacqueline looks for businesses that are interesting, that have strong brand values and that she thinks have potential to grow and succeed in their industry. She looks for quality products, well designed websites and entrepreneurs who appear to have a good business sense and who have thought about what the consumer wants and how to deliver it.

The #WOW campaign is very much about celebrating women in business and the ever growing number of women who are starting their own business. It is phenomenal to achieve this at such an early stage of our business, and I can’t wait to get involved with the #WOW community!

4) I moved house.

In fact, I’ve only just finished moving house. Ugh, isn’t it stressful?! And let me tell you, it’s even more stressful when you’re moving a business as well! But the plus side is that now I have a dedicated space to work and create in, which is FABULOUS. A nice big shiny kitchen for tea blending and packing and a separate workspace, with loads of storage. I don’t know how permenant this solution will be, but I’m hoping it will take me to September/October time before I need to expand to a temporary large space for next Christmas.

Well, that’s my main news!

Kim

December Drinkalong – Your Tea Advent Calendar Introduction

Okay, just two days until we start our December Drinkalong with the Tea Advent Calendars! I just wanted to give you a few little pointers for happy loose leaf brewing…!

1) The most important ingredient in your tea is the WATER. Water should always be freshly boiled, and preferably filtered. I always use bottled water as I live in a horrible hard water area, and never remember to fill up the water jug!! If you get that nasty ‘scum’ on your tea then try to use bottled water.

2) Never reboil your water. It’ll taste horrible, trust me.

3) If a tea is to be brewed at a temperature less than boiling, boil the water first and then let it cool, don’t stop the water halfway as this will affect the oxygen levels in the water!! 🙂 White tea is especially delicate and won’t withstand boiling water.

4) Your tea sachets will contains 2-3 cups of tea if it’s a loose leaf sachet. 1 tsp of tea per cup, although you may need a little more if you’re using a big mug!

5) For the first few days be a little bit shy with the amount of tea you use, until you can judge how much you like in your cup. If your tea is a little weak in flavour, use more tea, DON’T leave the tea in for longer. Leaving the tea in water for longer than suggested will increase the level of tannins in the tea, which is what produces that bitter flavour. 2-3 mins for white teas and green teas, and 3 mins for black teas should produce a good brew.

6) Always time your tea! Just use the stopwatch on your phone – I bet you’re already reading Facebook whilst waiting for the kettle to boil anyway! 😉

6) Fruit teas and herbal infusions are NOT teas, and therefore can take a longer infusion time, and need a longer brewing time to extract the flavours and nice rich colour. Having said that, don’t leave them in there all day!!

7) Follow our guide on serving suggestions! I suggest making one cup how we do, and then tweaking your second cup if you need to. Having said that, if you know you like extra lemon in your Earl Grey then just go for it!!

I’ve designed the tea advent calendars to be fun and enjoyable, and to introduce you to a wide range of teas. If you’re not sure what you’re doing then get in touch, we’re here to help! Find us on Facebook or pop us an email to hello@posttea.co and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can!

Happy Brewing 🙂

Kim

We Kept Calm and Drink Tea – Nigel Pamenter

A few months ago I had the pleasure of twitter-meeting Nigel Pamenter, (@NigelPamenter) an OU English degree student and tea fanatic. He was incredibly supportive of my pop up adventures in Camberley, and on my first day in the shop he sent me a lovely email about how much he’d enjoyed the teas he’d ordered from me the week before. Attached to an email was also a poem that he’d written for his course, a love poem to something ‘not human’. As Nigel put it, “Unsurprisingly, I chose tea!!!  Tea has a fascinating social history, along with iconic status particularly from the war years, so I kind of infused the various imagery into an acrostic poem.” I’ve included Nigel’s poem below – please note this is all his work, and all credit is given to him.

Thanks for sharing, Nigel!

We Kept Calm and Drank Tea

Always at my service, always the butler,

Bringer of brimming majesty.

Cheering countess, cheerleading from the shelf you

Demand noble devotion from your subjects.

Every day, Earl Grey, elegantly peerless.

Foraging, fumbling, sleepy fingers grappling,

Grabbing for the gold caddy, happy happy

Heaven in my hands, how

I am servile to such sexy sinensis.

Joy do not confine, jump for joy that

Kings, Queens, Knaves, all in between

Lost not their heads to loose leaf but

Moved mountains to share magic cargo,

New worlds, navigating the New World

Opining the merits of Oriental opium masses.

Pretty Camellia, came to play in the Garden of

Quiet England, quintessential reserve, its

Rear-gunner not resisting, no rearguard action.

Spitfires and squawks none, society instead

Taking high tea, tall tales like friends, absent

Uniforms no, unification yes,

V for Victory,

Winston’s two fingers, well, two sugars or one?

X on the calendar, X every eleventh of November

Yes, we will remember. Young the lost Rosy’s, the lost Lee’s.

Zulu Oscar, over and out, we won, tea won.

National Chocolate Week

This gallery contains 2 photos.

Here at PostTea we’re more than a little partial to chocolate, and so it seems right to have a little special offer for National Chocolate Week. All our Chocolateas Chocolate Teas are now 30% off online. No need for a … Continue reading →

Top Secret Product Development

Lots of new gifts on the production line at the moment. This one is still a few weeks off, but can’t wait to share it with everyone, so here’s a sneak preview….

Etsy Treasury Inclusions

I’ve not really publicised the fact that PostTea products are available for sale on Etsy. I have them there solely for an international buyer to ‘stumble upon’ – for 20 cents every three months it’s not too much to pay, and I’ve had a few sales! Nice to see items getting included in Treasuries though! One above, one below 🙂

PostTEA Pop Up Review

A sneak preview of our Pop Up adventure in Camberley – blog post to follow soon!

PostTea Pops Up

BE A PART OF POSTTEA’S FUTURE!

Hopefully you’ll have read our previous post about PostTea popping up in Camberley in July, and I’m still so excited about planning our little shop adventure. I’ve all sorts of ideas about what I want my space to look like and what’d I’d like to offer to the pop up shop customers, but I’ve one big hurdle to leap over before we get there!

Those who’ve been following PostTea’s story will know that PostTea was rather catapulted into the start-up world in February, when it won ‘Best Start-Up’ in Start Up Richmond’s Dragon’s Den Pitch Up competition. With the package of business support that we won we’ve managed to progress to the point where PostTea is ready to launch online! Through winning the competition we gained a small private investment which has managed to get us where we are today, and ready to launch online!

Whilst PostTea’s startup budget contained ‘contingency’ money for miscalculations or additional costs, it won’t cover the full costs of operating in the pop up shop for two weeks. We have enough money to cover the rent, but we don’t want to just ‘be’ there, we want to BE there. (It’s like going ‘out out’, instead of just ‘out’). We want to use the space to advertise properly, display our full range, have great visual merchandising and launch a couple of new tester ranges too!

To fund this venture, we need to raise about £500, although more would be amazing! To do this, we’ve linked up with Crowdfunder, the UK’s leading crowdfunding website. Crowdfunder helps fund a number of projects, big or small, that aim to change the world a little or a lot. Since our launch in 2010, the Crowdfunder network has raised over £500,000 for great ideas, people and projects.

For some, crowdfunding is a foreign concept – so what is crowdfunding? Crowdfunding is a way to fund various projects through sourcing funds from a crowd, so many backers instead of just one or two. By having an online backers platform, backers can pledge a small amount of money (PostTea’s pledges run from £5 to £200), and receive a reward for their pledge. Project owners are responsible for promoting their project, and therefore are responsible for the success of their project. A project does not receive any money if it doesn’t reach it’s target amount, but projects can exceed their total. Payment can be made either using Paypal, goCardless, or just with a debit/credit card. Money is not taken from backers until a project is completed – when the total has been reached and the project timeline has been completed.

So how can you help? There are a few ways:

1. By backing PostTea’s Pop Up Venture – we hope that having a range of pledge options will encourage lots of people to back our project, as whatever monetary level they are comfortable with.
2. Spread our message: We’ll be tweeting and posting on Facebook to spread the word about our project! We’re also going to post a couple of example tweets for you to tweet, and we’ll have some pdf adverts that you can email to your friends as well. Please share PostTea’s page, and retweet our tweets so we can grow and raise our funds!
3. Come and visit us! Once we’re set up in Camberley, come and visit us in our shops! We’d love to see all our supporters and backers, and hope that you’ll want to see for yourself what PostTea is all about!

We were so pleased that Crowdfunder love our project and were really brilliant about setting it up so quickly! We only have 30 days to achieve our £500 total, so please please help! 🙂

You can find our Crowdfunder page here:

http://crowdfunder.co.uk/helpppostteapopup/

Tea Sorbet Recipes – perfect for Summer!!

Now the weather is starting to get better, you may not fancy a steaming mug of tea in the afternoon. But how about a nice cooling scoop of tea sorbet? I’ve tried both of these in the past couple of weeks and they are truly delicious, absolutely perfect for the British summer we’re surely soon to get? Plus they’re a little bit better for you than ice cream, so you can feel virtuously good too!

Lemonade Iced Tea Sorbet:

• 2 cups boiling water
• 4 English Breakfast tea bags (I used Tregothnan’s Classic Tea Bags, but i’m keen to try it with Earl Grey too)
• 90g caster sugar
• Juice of 4 lemons
• 1 cup of cold water
• Mint sprigs (to serve)

Put the boiling water and tea bags in a large bowl and steep for five minutes. Discard tea bags. Add sugar to tea mixture, stirring until sugar dissolves. Cool completely, then stir in the juice and cold water; chill in the fridge for one hour.

Pour tea mixture into the freezer can of an ice-cream freezer; freeze according to manufacturer’s instructions, then transfer to a freezer safe container and put in the freezer.

If, like me, you haven’t got an ice cream maker, then chill the tea mixture in the freezer for two to three hours, then take it out and stir vigorously to break up the large ice chunks. Return to chilling stirring process two or three times.

Before serving the sorbet, remove from the freezer for a few minutes to help it soften. Serve with mint sprigs, if you like!

Blackberry Black Tea Sorbet:

• 675g rinsed blackberries
• 2 cups of brewed Darjeeling tea (teabags or loose tea, you choose!)
• 565g caster sugar

Whizz the blackberries up in a food processor until smooth, then pass the juice through a sieve so that it is nice and fine. 

Put the brewed tea into a saucepan and heat to quite a high temperature, then dissolve the sugar into the tea mixture.

Pour tea mixture into the freezer can of an ice-cream freezer; freeze according to manufacturer’s instructions, then transfer to a freezer safe container and put in the freezer.

If, like me, you haven’t got an ice cream maker, then chill the tea mixture in the freezer for two to three hours, then take it out and stir vigorously to break up the large ice chunks. Return to chilling stirring process two or three times.

Before serving the sorbet, remove from the freezer for a few minutes to help it soften. Serve with some fresh berries, and perhaps some melted dark chocolate if you want to be really naughty.

I think the second recipe would be lovely with any kind of mixed berried. I also have some lovely berry fruit tea coming this week from Jenier Teas, and would love to try that too.

Leave a comment if you give this a go! It really is pretty simple. Do you have any recipes that you use tea in?

PostTea Update

Once again I’ve been pretty tardy on updating the blog, but I’ve had good reasons this time! It’s been a very productive 10 days here for PostTea, and I finally have products coming together, branding finished, and a website oh so nearly sorted.

So ten days ago I finally secured a small amount of funding for PostTea – enough to get the first round of stock which will a) give me something to sell, b) something to work on, and c) some sales figures for when I need a second round of funding 🙂 (which, of course, I already have plans for!)

To be totally honest, the financials was the only thing that was holding me back, and so as soon as the money entered my bank account it was leaving again! I’d already decided what equipment I needed, and where I was getting stock from. Now these things have started to arrive, and it’s massively exciting!

First to arrive was the mug press – with finances pretty tight, I’m having to do a lot of in house design, which is great, but I’m not the most proficient on Illustrator  In fact, I’ve found this pretty awesome course to do on Skillshare. Led by Brad Woodard, Learn The Ins and Outs of Illustrator seems to be exactly what I need to do just to gain a little bit of confidence. At only $20 for the course, it was a bargin to start of with, then I got a 50% first course discount, and an additional 25% off that with a discount code from Ez’s Creature Comforts blog that I read every day! With the exchange rate that makes £5.07 for what is a highly recommended course by a great teacher. I really have nothing to lose!

The first mug out of the press

Having said I’m pretty rubbish with Illustrator I have managed to make a couple of designs and start to work out the Illustrator interface a little. That, coupled with the new sublimation printer, and mug press, gave me a couple of days of ‘play’ with the new equipment. It’s all pretty logical, and I can’t wait to start churning the designs out properly 🙂

Ordered shortly after was all the box contents – mainly the tea! I knew what tea I wanted to order, and that’s been done, and I’ve also ordered the loose leaf tea to make the boxes a bit more special –  I haven’t gone crazy here, because using loose leaf makes the tea more expensive, plus it means that it has to be weighed, repackaged, and rebranded. And of course, you can’t rely on everyone having a tea strainer at home either, so I’ve had to solve that problem. All done now, just waiting for the tea to turn up. I’m working on the branding for the (exceptionally cute) tea tins now – they’re looking great.

As well as tea, I’ve catered for the hot chocolate lovers. The chocolate sticks from Choc-O-Lait arrived today and I can’t wait to sample them later tonight. Again, this makes the box more expensive, but caters for a different audience. I’m not sure many of them will shift at this time of year, but I have them ready for the cooler seasons, and to be honest, who knows what the weather is up to in this country anyway?!

Choc-o-lait cubes.

I’m also working on getting coffee sorted for the boxes too, although I’m finding this a little hard because I don’t drink coffee, and so don’t know where to even start. I’ve had a couple of emails to and from Alistair at Home Ground Coffee and I’d love to have him involved as his knowledge is incredible. We’ll just have to see how it all goes for now!

Other than that, I’m still looking for a casual sewist to take over some the mug hug construction (the mug hug drawer is woefully empty) – my wonderful friend Susie has offered to help, but I’d love to just get 300 made up ready for the launch. Any offers?! Honestly, it’s nothing more complicated than sewing a straight line and sewing a button so do get in touch if you’re interested!

I’m sorry it’s all a little engimatic still – but trust that the big reveal is only a few short weeks away! Hurrah!