Get ready, tea-sters! A new tea supply site is opening up for beta testing this spring. (My wallet is already flailing in despair.) I spoke to Tony Angelos, the owner, to get the scoop, and here’s what I’ve learned!
Tea Market (teamarket.us) is a multi-boutique platform that will, like Etsy, Amazon, or Ebay, allow individual sellers to sell their teas to the user.What makes the site unique will be its tea focus, so the search parameters will be specific to tea types, ingredients, etc, which can be difficult to search on current sites.
Tony expressed his initial idea for Tea Market to be based on “frustration” from lack of tea resources online:
“I was at work looking for tea since I was running low, but googling ‘where to find good tea online,’ doesn’t really help you at all. So I was like, ‘to heck with this, I can do this better.’ “
There will also be a loyalty and reviewing program that sounds really useful:
“In my opinion, trying to decide which tea you want from the description is like reading a wine or beer list at a restaurant, you kind of just go with what you know, or whatever sounds good. We want to encourage user reviews so we’re going to do that with points. Once customers have their own profile, they get points (1 point for every dollar spent), but when they review the tea, they double their points. The points can be used towards anything on the site.”
Right now, there are 22 sellers that have expressed interest in joining up with the site. If the site eventually gets big enough, Tony’s got some pretty awesome plans:
“Once we grow big enough to have our own space, we’ll have a tea and coffee bar in the office for employees but also like a film studio area where we have live streams of tea blenders or tea authorities come in and talk or show how they blend some of their favorite teas. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn.”
If you want to get involved, as a seller or a customer, you can sign up on their site for updates. They’ll most likely be extending their beta testing opportunities to those lists first. In the meantime, you can check them out on facebook and instagram!
This post was posted in TeaMarket