I've been considering writing about what it means to have been the subject of an interview related to being a tea blogger, or something along that line. It doesn't mean anything in particular, of course, just a touch of exposure, probably partly as thanks for helping a tea vendor and friend with minor editing and online mentions (Sergey Shevelev, the founder of Moychay).
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the unconventional grooming look has progressed well since then |
I keep discussing a deeper and related theme, about people promoting tea awareness, across different channels and in different forms. As it has always stood more discussion and group promotion occurs on an even and open basis among many participants, not as led by any one expert, or "cult of personality" center. There are exceptions. As much as many people question Don Mei and Mei Leaf's business orientation and ethics to be sure he has done as much as anyone in promoting tea awareness, through Youtube basics theme content creation. The ethics issues were mainly about fair pricing and getting communicated details right, both kind of grey areas, with a take on the rest here. The Global Tea Hut mixing of tea and religion themes ends up being criticized, which I addressed here, but as I see it to some extent it's really more about people with both interests sharing and developing those forms together than as a mainstream influence of tea culture.
Others aspire to fulfill a similar role. Most often that seems to stem directly from a strong personal interest in advancing tea awareness and culture, to help others, and of course also to business interest. Sergey of Moychay, that interviewer related to the video I've mentioned, and So Han Fan of a Texas based tea business are good examples of this. Both create online content to help introduce people to tea basics, and from there extend to exploring interesting aspects of tea culture and background. It comes up in other places; this Polish vendor seems to have driven their business and tea awareness through Youtube promotion, seemingly with Rafał Przybylok filling the role of a high profile tea promoter.
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another interesting tea persona |
If we have an isolated few individuals stepping forward to serve as promising tea evangelists, and multiple platforms and channels of tea discussion groups, why is it that tea awareness spreads so slowly, that none of this ever worked as a stronger catalyst? One can only guess, or identify likely partial causes. One guess is that it's starting from so far from coffee preference scope that interest level doubling a few times isn't noticeable.
I'm reminded of an interesting video example about exponential growth curves, which is worth watching, from back at the beginning of the spread of covid. It explains why exposure doubling in a patterned way is especially problematic, just not at first. The example was about what happens if we repeatedly double the amount of water in the Grand Canyon, on a set interval (I think starting from a low level, in the example, from a liter of water or something such, to make the point more dramatically). Of course flooding would be severe right away, if you start from doubling a current river level, but if you start with periodically doubling a liter of water instead the doubling doesn't seem noticeable at all for awhile. Then the second half of the canyon fills in the last time-interval unit, whatever that had been set to.
So what feels like tea building to a critical mass of interest taking awhile may just be how a slow natural progression of increase would normally feel, in earlier stages. On the opposite side we kind of get used to the "going viral" theme relating to everyone jumping on an interest, trend, or idea in short order. But that pattern is something else, related to a fashion trend or app interest spreading faster, with tea preference uptake a different kind of thing. It spreads through people having experiences, one person connecting through contact with another, not like memes do, where a cute image of a dog or The Rock making a funny face can be copied thousands of times in a week, or a limitless number.
To back up a bit, I've been considering lots of subjects in relation to Youtube content promotion, and it's interesting how the pattern of Youtuber popularity tends to happen. The form of interest progression might connect. It takes a content producer a long time to struggle to reach 10,000 followers, and from there the move to 100k can be much faster. A local Thai lifestyle blogger commented a little on this, making a concerted effort to reach 10k viewers over the last half a year, pushing on to exchange following with other Youtubers doing a series of interviews, and they moved on from 10k to 16k followers within a couple of months.
It reminds me of the Matthew principle:
For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
— Matthew 25:29, RSV.
As I see it this is at the root of the problem people have with the "white privilege," that the real starting points for personal financial success in relation to having a favorable childhood, education, business starting point, and connections really relate to a main cause of someone already being successful prior to their actual business success. It gets interpreted as the effect from not struggling with minority status, poverty, personal debt, a lack of early childhood support, and so on, but really the keys to success were built up across the first 20 years of everyone's lives, versus there being few limitations blocking them. Or else they weren't. Cases where Elon Musk or Donald Trump's parents granted them millions of dollars in start-up funding are something else, but the same pattern applies, that it would take over a lifetime for a normal person to collect together a few million dollars in seed capital.
Only partly related, and tying to another dimension, someone asked in a Quora question what made children stand out as popular, and many answered that wealth or attractiveness would cause that. That's true, but it's also expectations, at least as I see things and answered that. By the age of 5 this social role development is largely complete, and by 8 it's all the more solidified, based on what I've experienced from raising two children to or past that age. I suppose it makes a difference if it really is physical attractiveness, wealth, or expectations related to parents implicitly emphasizing that their children will be social leaders. It could be seen as their birthright, but only on an implied level; that's what I was getting at.
Really I'm still talking about two different subjects, wealth and class status as an input, and a set of social expectations that has a profound effect on young children. So does this even connect back to tea themes, to awareness spreading, or to the influence of social leaders in driving that change? Probably, but I would guess that the patterns aren't simple enough to be easy to follow. To consider a natural evolution from early start-up to tea industry leader we need to consider an example case.
Yunnan Sourcing as an example
I've used this as an example of a successful tea business in a relatively recent post, and it will work again to support this related point. I'll cite from external material cited in that post, about Scott Wilson's personal background and perspective, that business founder:
...I came to Yunnan in 1998 and just fell in love with the place, especially the tea and the food. In 2004, I got fed up with being in the states and decided to pursue my dream of living in China and doing something with tea...
We have a tea room in the Kunming Wholesale tea market. It is a place solely to drink tea. We have a library of more than 600 pu-erhs that are available to try! Our eBay store is our only online presence at the moment. Most business is conducted outside of eBay. In fact, individual customers with small orders can contact me directly and get at least 10% (or more) off the retail price. We will open yunnansourcing.com and yunnansourcing.us before the end of 2009. The latter site will feature products that will ship from the USA instead of China...
So that content is from prior to the end of 2009, or at least 13 years ago. I could develop my own interpretation of how Scott's personality and later business decisions inform this kind of narrative, but it's more interesting to me which parts of a business story followed, and which didn't develop. He did use social media content posts to support those sales, but not to the same extent Don Mei and Sergey Shevelev did. A Facebook vendor support and discussion group has expanded discussion of his business offerings, but that was started by an independent fan, per my understanding. How could he and his business become uniquely successful then?
It was the right theme at the right time. Sales site catalog and vending outlets are common now, for tea and any number of other goods, but they certainly weren't in 2009. Beyond timing the broad product selection, value, and clear descriptions could only come from someone with that degree of product exposure, from years of working within a Chinese sourcing and vending system (5 years, it looks like in that source).
So it wasn't "cult of personality" driven (although Scott is interesting and nice). Tea blogs and tea discussion circles were well-developed by 2009, but as I see it that was the beginning of a "golden age" for groups, the time of Tea Chat and Steepster, with Facebook groups soon to follow. I joined my first FB tea group in 2013, and became a moderator for an International themed version 6 years ago, with that three years mapping out a lot of the ramp-up time of FB tea group. Many thousands of people have mentioned Yunnan Sourcing as a good place to buy tea over this last decade, based on having positive experiences themselves; the success came from that.
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Elyse of Tealet using a meetup channel form to connect and share information |
All that makes it sound like women aren't tea subject social media influencers, or that one person sharing their own knowledge and perspective is a conventional form, versus podcasts, discussion groups, meetups, and so on. Really the opposite of both is more true, that tea expertise isn't a gender-specific theme, and that alternate and broadly varied forms of information sharing are now the norm. Sergey (again of Moychay) interviewing me is a standard theme in his channel, about showing different locations or events, or meeting with someone else offering their own input.
Connecting it further
It seems like there are next steps to follow that will drive tea popularity, and the industry, or else sales forms and uptake will continue as they have. Not necessarily mostly from individual inputs, but that always could be a factor, some kind of visionary, high profile business developer doing more, or a popular celebrity adding exposure.
It's strange how the larger corporate inputs have stifled the growth of popularity of tea, instead of supporting it. I'm not sure that's only a coincidence. Starbucks bought Teavana, and let it thrive to a good sized mall chain, but the decline of mall popularity in the US seemed tied to shutting the entire business down. Unilever bought T2, a small outlet chain poised to move an entire level beyond the scale of "mom and pop" cafe or dry tea outlet business, and shifted product focus to higher return blends, swapping out higher quality teas sold previously. Covid hit that business hard, another casualty of negative external influence. I don't think both large corporations killed the businesses on purpose, but shifting to a high-return, lower quality product theme probably didn't help either.
Oprah promoting tea might've been a main launching point, but instead she tried to sell her own herbal and tea blended chai product, which wasn't really universally well-received. See a pattern here? Oprah, Teavana, and T2 weren't promoting prior accepted tea versions, or the Chinese tea cultural experience, or pushing on to highlight more interesting and higher quality offerings, they were promoting specific lower quality products that they could potentially make a higher return on than those other types of products. And that failed more than it succeeded in all three cases.
Expansion through small vendor sales has been the norm in the tea industry, with real significant growth limited to a broader wholesale layer ramping up. This gives rise to the ability for new tea forms to appear and gain exposure faster, and also limits the degree of that exposure. Hundreds of small businesses either are or are not involved in that successful marketing promotion, each with very limited influence, taken alone.
It almost seems like an economy of scale limitation issue is holding tea in place in this current form. Past a certain threshold tea might experience what wine did way back when (in the late 80s?), when a critical mass of interest might enable media channel development, and support a broader producer and distributor network. I was interested in wine in the 90s, and there was a great local shop that sold all sorts of interesting versions in my small town (a ski town with a few thousand residents), but with no comparable tea shop there, I think even now. There was an "alternative perspective" oriented health foods shop, so I did venture into tisanes a little, but not plain tea, which just wasn't around, beyond new tea bag offerings (eg. Tazo).
When I see tea related Youtube channels or groups grow to include much higher follower count it makes me wonder if we aren't seeing that slow progressive growth play out, now in that later form, onto doubling from significant numbers then very large ones. I've just noticed that the Reddit r/tea group membership is unusually large, at 645,000 members, which one can assess better from considering my 2018 writing on that topic:
The main problem with online tea interest groups--beyond activity tending to drop off at some point--seems to be people being on the same page, sharing perspective. Facebook groups work well for sorting that naturally; if you talk about scope beyond group theme interest you probably won't hear much back, or feedback could be negative.
That's why it's odd that the Reddit subforum works; it isn't sorted, beyond an emphasis on most people being newer to tea. That's also probably why it has 120k+ members and almost none of them seem to be regulars, beyond the moderators. There are some but they are exceptions. Vendors had seemed to be more active in the past but a few scandals about product promotion inconsistencies may have threw off the friendly neighborhood self-promotion vibe...
So r/tea increased five-fold in under 4 years; not bad. "My" FB tea group, really owned by a friend who runs a Chinese vending outlet and training organization, has levelled off at 25,000 members, still adding new ones, but not at the rate that brought it to that level. I think the "new to tea" theme is more promising for broad membership. For promoting advanced tea interest what the Gong Fu Cha group evolved to become works better, than for a general producer and vendor oriented "international" theme, even though both groups are about the same size now in terms of membership count.
One might look closer at group sub-themes and try to sort out the role they are playing through that lens, but that might miss parts of the larger picture. For any number of reasons a half a million new Reddit followers joined that tea sub in four years, a group that isn't doing much beyond letting people express their own interest, post by post. The average post has been and will continue to be images of boxes of tea bags sitting in a kitchen cabinet, the kinds I said were all that existed in the early 1990s. But then maybe it's not an anomaly that finally in the last year that range has expanded, with "better tea quality" related posts only now turning up on a daily basis.
I think it's easy to misplace how Don Mei and Sergey Shevelev building up to over 100,000 Youtube followers changes things. I watch Youtube content about some strange and random subjects, without much meaning, perspective, or connection to my life habits, but for sure those videos are helping people move on to buying and brewing a broader range of tea. The channels alone must generate more video views ad revenue than most home tea businesses (unless ads are turned off?), which is partly beside the point, but also worth considering.
Let's back up to a level of assumptions I've not yet addressed here: why would I want more people to drink tea? If my own reader numbers double that changes nothing; there is no ad revenue from this blog, and no financial gain through another business function. Topic bloggers can tend to tie their personal self-image to a subject theme; I think that's a lot of it. Usually that plays out in a 3 to 4 year blog lifecycle, before it either leads to financial return or not, but in rare cases people might stick with it, for no normal reason. Maybe there could be a perception that later gain could follow, that a different kind of meaning could evolve.
I like to think that I'm really still just sharing experience, except that I've moved on from basic exploration, what different kinds of oolongs are, to digging deeper into local production issues, or other background, like social media influence.
Given the range of broad speculation here I should end this with my guesses about the future of tea. Do I think tea interest is "really about to take off," or that gradual and increasing rate uptake will have the tea sales, vending forms, common offerings, and interest groups looking about the same in another decade? I think there will be a tipping point experience, I just don't know when, or what extra factors will seem to fold in. Conventional media mirrors common perception in not caring about tea; maybe both will change together. NPR ran some articles at one point, or moderate sized food interest pages also sometimes do, or a more mainstream newspaper might mention "duck shit" oolong as a novelty; that has been most of it.
It might take a decade for tea to get where coffee was in the early 90s, for seeing an interest level spike, or maybe only half that long. It's easy to forget that there were an awful lot of small but developed theme specialty coffee shops around before Starbucks arrived at a format that consolidated the interest trend, and put a lot of those out of business. The changes in progress are complex in form, and take time.
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