New Essence of Tea Pu-Erh Club
Thought I’d chime in with some comments and hopefully answer some questions…
1. It is expensive. We thought long and hard about it, but felt that in order to put together a couple of decent parcels of the kind of teas that we’d like to share, it couldn’t really be much less. We wanted to offer the kind of tea club that we’d like to join ourselves – really high end teas with minimal money wasted on postage costs. Cutting the cost would limit the kinds of teas we could share.
2. Bundling the spring and autumn shipments together helps us make a long term commitment with the farmers. Having a steady relationship helps to ensure that you get the best teas on a long term basis. This is especially important when dealing with very old single trees or ancient wild trees that are in demand from tea tourists who don’t have any longer relationship. We felt this responsibility should be shared with the tea club members who get to receive their teas.
3. If you’d like to pick and choose, this tea club or any tea club really isn’t for you. The people who’ve been signing up so far are generally customers who’ve been with us for years and know and appreciate our tastes and quality. Asking people to make this kind of commitment isn’t something I take lightly, so of course we’ll do our best to meet and exceed everyone’s expectations.
4. Beyond the first year sign-up, there’s no further commitment, though of course I hope that people will be more than pleased enough with the quality that they’ll be happy to continue.
5. I’d expect the autumn shipment to be around the same quantity of tea as the Spring. The autumn harvest is quite a bit cheaper generally.
I hope this helps explain some of our thinking. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions.
I am not a long time customer, actually I’ve never bought anything from your store before. This is a very expensive intro, but I like the idea of this tea club and will be an awesome experienced for me. Here is the reason why I joined: I could go to your website and order some samples that I may or may not like and pay half the price. Sure, I would be immediately saving like $400 dollars, but I would have a bunch of samples. Instead, I am getting some cakes, which if I don’t like the quality or taste, can let it age. And if it’s really good, one day, years later, I won’t care about the money I spent back then. Plus the savings on shipping. I would have the charge for the samples, then another charge for the teas I liked. Then maybe another one before the end of the year to restock. That’s one of my reasons for being into this club. It’s also exciting to know I’m building a relationship between farmers and yourselves. Maybe you could include something in the shipment about the places the tea comes from? Pictures and things would be great. : – )
Thanks for the vote of confidence Brian. We hope to include information and pictures of most of the offerings. There’s been good feedback generally from our customers for this tea club & I have confidence in the quality of the teas we’ve found this year. Hopefully we can continue this in the coming years & build long term and strong relationships with the farmers. It seems the only way really to ensure quality and influence them in a way that protects the environment and the trees in the long term.
If this club was for aged puerh, I might have joined. Love the aged puerh I have tried from EoT so far, they were all very good value. But I’m not so much looking for young puerh these days…
Thanks for the kind words Bef. For aged tea, there’s usually not such a limit on the quantity available. If we find aged teas that we’d like to sell, it generally makes more sense for us to offer them via the website and let people pick and choose. The idea behind this tea club was to be able to share the more limited quantity special teas that we find each season in Yunnan.
Dex is an idiot and posted a comment on the wrong thread. I’ve edited it off as those comments were not mean to be direct at The Essence of tea. Please accept my humble apology for the mix up….
Hi Dexter, thanks for the feedback. It’s really useful to hear these suggestions. Once things calm down a bit on our return from our Spring sourcing trip, I’ll put together a page with this info.
We ship worldwide from Malaysia & have a flat rate of £12 for parcels below £100 and free worldwide shipping for orders above that. There’s also an option for EMS shipping which gets calculated at checkout.
I hope this helps. Thanks again for the feedback.
OMG – sooooo sorry this isn’t on the right thread – I was replying to another new vendor asking for web site feedback.
I honestly have not looked at your site at all. The issues of quotes not working were not on your site. I am truely sorry for this mix up (not even sure how this would have gotten here….)
But yes I like to see shipping info out front – it’s the first thing I look for on a new site…..
I will take this down – just want to be sure you see my apology.
Sorry….. :((
hahaha, no problem at all. We could probably do with having some clearer info anyway :)
Just for the record I was on your site for less than 15 seconds and found a banner that read “Going forward, we’re offering FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING on orders over £100” That is pretty clear to me and was found quickly and easily You ship world wide and it’s free over 100 pounds. :))
:) thanks for clearing it up Dexter. No need to worry though, we do get a few emails asking about more shipping details, so I think a clearer page would be a good option for us.
Well, now the club is out, not much was written about it yet. I haven’t joined (yet..), but a friend of mine has. He’s been so generous as to send me samples of all the teas in the club.
While I haven’t tried all of them yet, I’ve tried about half, and since my taste is very similar to his, I’d be surprised to be surprised by the second half. To make it short, we’re very happy. We both feel that the amount and quality of the tea is more than worth it.
To make it a bit more concrete: Tthere are some teas which maybe won’t please everyone. For example, one of my favorite teas of all time, the EoT 2009 Wuliang Wild, has returned and some similar teas have been in the package, too. I’m pretty sure that it is a purple tea, even though EoT for some reason never mention the word “purple” as far as I can see. Some people are not too fond of the character of purple teas, and they might not love all the teas in the club. I, of course, have been very happy to see the Wuliang Wild return.
We also both think that EoT has a special profile, and I probably wouldn’t recommend signing up blindly if you haven’t tried many EoT teas yet. But if you know and like the selections made by Kathy and David so far, I presume that you will like the club, too. I’m thinking about looking for someone to share the club with, this would make it much more affordable as well.
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