Ask a former teavana employee (who's two year nondisclosure agreement is up!) anything!

At Teavana, it has always been 2oz, as it’s the closest rounded measure to the 50g standard instituted in germany.

If they’ve done that, they did you a solid, and are worth seeing again. the ones that do this are really trying to keep you as a return customer – and it reflects in their reports, but! Selling less than 2oz is a fireable offense, as it’s actually FDA regulated (weights and measures, or something.)

Is this a labeling issue where Teavana doesn’t have the proper labels to reflect the weight on packages that are less than two ounces?

Nope. I have measured out tea at less than 2oz and it weighed, printed, and rang out just fine… (Not that I ever did that in reality. That was just a… dream. yes. a dream.)

We have a textbook-sized manual that most trainers skip over, recommending but not requiring that we read it in our free time. It’s still basic info (which for tea, can be encyclopedic on it’s own), but yeah. Not much knowledge is needed to sell, necessarily.

You didn’t answer the question about incentives! I’m curious about that, since they do seem quite aggressive.

Right! Incentives! Hoooooooo boy did we get incentives in my day. Free cast iron pots, free tea, free nice tins! And the lower-level benefits of ‘nice job today, take a dented tin and 2oz of tea home’. There was a treasure chest full of glass pots with broken strainers, ceramic or yixing with broken lids (Superglue is awesome for these things), cast iron cups that were mis-painted, cracked enamel. Sometimes you got a trip to the box. Sometimes a pot would be a ‘This week, highest Cast iron sales gets the 40oz orbits that shipped with a chipped lid.’

I think it’s less obtainable now, but I wouldn’t know…

Tell me about it.

retail work is the easiest to exploit. It’s easy to hire people at stores they like shopping at, and so easy to replace them. This means retailers ask waaaay above and beyond 8/hr and never pay it out to the employee…

HA! Fill the tin, fill the tin, fill the tin.

Understand, Tevana is used to selling to coffee drinkers. When I say a pound of tea, a coffee drinker thinks about 30 cups… not 200 that tea provides. Teavana began showing customers who have never bought loose tea before what a pound of tea looked like, so they would be able to make an informed decision. They then realised that people were buying it that way, assuming that’s how it’s done… and then required it be done across the company.

In my day, 40%.

Now that it’s owned by starbucks, it’s 30%, and not on everything, as I understand.

Discontinued teas are very rarely brought back; it usually involves a farmer completely changing the way they handle thier crops, as Teavana’s quality standards are actually surprisingly strict. A batch of peppermint in colorado was found to be contaminated, triggering Teavana to pull all peppermint permanently until they found anew farm.

It’s in the manual, but not required to know. So the minimum is what’s printed on the tin.

Understand that the company was founded by a Chinese expatriot, so those guidelines are actually fairly accurate. Occasionally, the company gets thier hands on good stuff because of her influence (Nancy Mack), and benefits greatly from her advice.

because I’m a huge nerd, I learned the japanese and chinese tea ceremonies and shopped local stores for thigns that teavan didn’t carry. The store really caters to complete tea newbs, and getting people to just steep a bunch of spices in hot water was like pulling teeth in my store, let alone using a gaiwan or, Heaven forbid, work through gonfu brewing.

So it really varies from person to person by thier passion. do they like tea, or just having a job? retail is retail, and a fairly incestuous industry at that. Many people juggle teavana with other retail jobs and simply don’t care.

I never knew who the founder was or how the company got started! Can you tell us more about the history and background of the company?

Nancy and Andy Mack started the company as a mall kiosk in Atlanta, Georgia, in the mid 90’s. Nancy came from china, and was amazed at all of the coffee knowledge. Looking for similar knowledge of her favourite beverage from china, she found none… and so the idea to run a tea shop began. I don’t remember how they got the funding to start, but it began like every other small tea shop, ordering from distributors before Nancy had the idea to just go home and start ordering from the farms she grew up near. It grew from there, and had a really cool idea: To bring knowledge of tea to the masses of America. It’s working. They stabilized prices in the industry, made the market exist in places it didn’t before (I worked in a pretty blue-collar no-nonsense town… selling tea was tough., and grew general awareness. Just before I left, they went public, and then were bought out by starbucks. But, it all started with a chinese woman wanting to introduce the tea lifestyle to america… and you have to say, it’s worked.

Teavana is what got me into loose leaf teas, so from my perspective it sure has worked!

And that’s my favourite thing about it. Here we are now, in-the-company-of-those-who-know, and learning about the tea industry as a whole.

They are both reasonable and overpriced. A silver needle at the three local shops were all within $1 of Teavana’s prices, so I felt at the time that the straight teas were fair priced. Considering that Teavana did it’s own donation to a charity for tea harvesting families, the extra dollar saved/spent (it truly varied) depended on quality.

I know at the time, Teavana sourced according to over 155 quality standards. Also, since they’ve been a guaranteed buyer if you got a deal with them, farms were giving Teavana first pick of the first flush. I used to bring in silver needle from Adagio, two local shops, and some that was given as a gift. The silver needle from teavana always brewed more ‘true to style’, as we call it in beer judging.

The herbals are a bit steep, but there is something to be said for how they blend flavours. There’s basically a large room in atlanta with thousands of ingredients, all white, sterile, and odd feeling, but people with somellier-like senses for tea laboured endlessly, looking for the perfect blend. A cupping there was a real treat.

They also had overhead from mall rent… and being dicked around by mall owners is another part of the sickening retail suckhole that generally makes things like a nice tea shop hard to run in a mall.

Tl;dr prices are fair on straight teas, and typically $1-3 more per 2oz than they should be on herbals.

As far as fun, it was very fun. Our manager hired a team of people that would work well together, as a corporate strategy. We had similar interests, so we never had a ‘Shit, have to work x shift with y person’ day. But it did have drawbacks… the sales process memorization was key to promotions, and there was a small bit of politics involved in moving into a job that payed decently. So when a teavana employee tells you they’re having a great day, they mean it, and if they’re ever a bit short… chances are there’s either a lack of sales or a manager breathing on their shoulder from a distance.

tl;dr, it’s fun if you’re not trying to get promoted. I’d go back as a side job, but never as a main rent-paying job.

I have to agree about blending the flavors. Teavana has some of the best flavors I’ve tried.

Remembered something…Ok, now I adore Citrus Lavender Sage. However, it is just alittle too steep for me to warrant getting on a regular basis. (I usually get it to blend with Opus Rouge or one of the other fruity herbals. And I tend to hoard it just a little bit.) It’s not a question but a little frustration I wanted to air.

Oh, and I understand that frustration… but the ingredients in that one in particular are hard to harvest… we’re talking flower heads and specific parts of specific leaves on small wild bush-like plants… CLS is wonderful… and is, unfortunately, high priced.

We were to admit that ti was true. Teavana did a full recall.

Is this something that happens often? Amongst all tea companies, not just Teavana.

All companies, all products. Tea, sunglasses, baby strollers, Television sets.

That said, teavana in my day was aggressively expanding. I think quality control was a bit burdened. It was a growing stage, and balls were dropped. In many areas.

I’m assuming that has to do with dilution? If you make 10oz of mate, and 10oz of herbal lets say (those are just easy round numbers not realistic amounts of tea) and you pour them into a 20oz glass, when you drink it you won’t be getting the same amount of caffine that you’d get if you drank 20oz of pure mate. Thats the logic I assumed went behind it but it might be something I’m missing.

Hi there, I’m also an ex-teavana employee, so I thought I’d pipe in. When you combine two teas in your cup, they use half the amount of loose leaf for each type. For example, a 16oz hot tea from Teavana uses 3 teaspoons of tea. So in the case that you blend two, you will only be getting 50% Mate and 50% herbal, which reduces your caffeine content. As for the not stirring your tea, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t oblige the request with an herbal tea. It just seems like laziness. Typically, they would tell us to make sure the water was at a correct temperature, add the tea, and then lightly press it down into the water with a stir stick if it was not fully submerged. However, I didn’t usually have a problem with any of the tea remaining dry at all.

If you were brewing by the Teavana handbook, you were using full amounts of each tea. It depends on your store trainer’s ego (Oh, gods, the micromanaging from all higher levels was confusing as all hell. More on that later.) whether you follow the rules or not.

So in our store, a 16oz cup of tea had 6 oz of tea in a 2 tea blend, making the ‘diluting caffeine’ thing a joke in our store… it really was case-by-case.

They don’t stir the tea in because they already pour the hot water on top of the tea, penetrating the ingredients and guaranteeing their inclusion in the infusion. They don’t stir herbals because even though it’s an herbal, you can squeeze extra flavours from some ingredients and not others, thus changing the brew of the tea. Remember, there is a big bit of science that goes into ingredient selection… and squeezing, stirring, pressing, etc. alters the flavour from what the tea was intending to produce.