Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, ceramics artist Michael Menashy talks about how an award-winning tea set he made led him to start Tea Sparrow, a business that caters to tea connoisseurs by delivering the world’s best blends to them.
“I’m a ceramic designer. That’s what got me into this in the first place. In 2010 I won an award from the World Tea Expo for the best designed ceramic tea set. My parents are from India and I’ve been drinking loose-leaf tea all my life. But when I went to the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas I was blown away by how little I knew.
“I chose my three favourite companies, and I ordered about $300 worth of tea from each of the three vendors, opened up a wholesale account, and I held my first tea party with all my family and friends. People went crazy. That’s where the idea came from of creating a monthly tea club.
“I called in my younger brother, and he found one of the best companies in Toronto to put together a website. I created all the artwork with a gentleman from India.
“Our job is to go out and rank everyone’s teas and find out who is the best or the worst. We actually go through the entire blending community across North America, Europe and Asia. Jane Pettigrew is one of the world’s leading tea sommeliers. She’s basically the queen bee of the loose-leaf industry, and she endorses our club, and through her we get access to blenders around the world.
“Blenders give us their five best teas. Once we receive it, we look for chemicals, and anything with chemicals we throw out. With the remaining teas, we have public tea parties biweekly. We get about 12 people on average. We get everything from novice tea drinkers who want to learn more to connoisseurs and sommeliers. Our job is to taste all the teas and vote on which teas taste the best.
“Any tea that gets an 8.5 out of 10 by all 12 members makes it into our monthly tea box. It has four different teas. It generally has one rooibos tea, one herbal tea, one black tea and one green tea.
“We ship once a month and right now we’re 400-plus members. That’s generating $8,000 a month just from members. Plus there’s gift tea boxes and corporate stuff. Some 85% of our business is subscriptions and 15% [is] gifts.
“Our strongest markets are Vancouver, followed by Toronto, California and Calgary. Right now my Tea Sparrow company has almost exceeded my ceramics company.
“What’s fun about our club is that, on every package of tea, we tell you who the blender is, and we give you their website information. The idea behind it is that if you fall in love with a tea, we want you to order from the blenders.
“When you sign up, we give you a pause and restart button. Any time you can pause your account so you’re not being billed.
“In January of this year we auditioned for Dragons’ Den. We got the callback from them. The Dragons’ Den was pretty interested in having us on their show in January 2014.”
