Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
STARTUP IN VEGAS CONNECTS TEA GROWERS, BUYERS
Petersen nurtures opportunity from ‘club-type thing’ to bulk business
Question: How did you get started? Answer: Tealet was an idea that started when I was in my MBA program at the University of Hawaii. I worked on a report for the state on the growth of the tea plant. They saw that it could grow in Hawaii, but they didn’t know if it was going to be worth the investment of developing the industry. We found there was an opportunity, but there were a lot of challenges in the marketing of these products.
My final semester I had an internship in Japan and, while there, I helped found a nonprofit to create a bridge between tea growers and tea lovers.
We made connections, and through meeting growers from India, Taiwan and China, I learned that the problems in that marketing report in Hawaii were the same problems that these growers are dealing with. The tea growers that I befriended recommended building an eBay-like website where I could sell their teas to tea lovers in the United States.
My first weekend back in Hawaii, there was a startup weekend. I had no experience with startups, but I decided to go just to test out my idea. We ended up taking second place, and one of the judges was a venture partner of a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley.
He really believed in our business idea and said if I would focus in and build a website and get some initial sales to prove that there is a demand that his fund would like to invest in us. I had just graduated so I had no job. I gave myself six months to see how it would go, and then I would go get a job after that. But within five months, we were already moved up into Silicon Valley, got our first investment and really went on the journey.
Q: How long were you in Silicon Valley?
A: We were in Silicon Valley for about six months, then we moved back to Hawaii and just kind of hit a wall of opportunity. We had converted our business from this “tea of the month” club-type thing and realized that there would be a plateau of growth on that so we were pivoting what our customers were asking for. They were tea shop owners, asking to buy our teas in bulk.
Things were going well, but I was finding myself traveling to the mainland often to speak at shows or conferences and doing sales calls. And I just had an intuition that that’s what I would need to continue to do to grow the business, but it was really difficult to be doing that from Hawaii because flights are really expensive, it’s time-consuming and I was actually finding myself being away from Hawaii for like two months at a time. It just wasn’t like a really good balance, so we decided it would be necessary for us to move away from Hawaii.
So then we had a couple of friends that had moved to Las Vegas for the Downtown Project. My brother (then working full-time with Tealet) and I thought about it, and we’re like, ‘You know what, let’s not each even check it out, let’s just go.’ They have a really great airport here, there’s lots of conferences that happen, the World Tea Expo happens here.
Q: What’s one major trend in the tea industry?
A: The trend this year is transparency in sourcing and marketing. When you’re finding the products that you’re going to sell as a company, having transparency of knowing where everything is coming from, how everything is made, how the agriculture is being done, how the workers are being treated.
Q: What problem is Tealet trying to solve?
A: We’re trying to bring transparency to the supply chain of tea. There’s a lot of marketing saying there’s transparency there but there ultimately is not. Q: What’s the next step? A: The main one that I can talk about and look forward to sharing with all of Las Vegas is our involvement with the Lucky Dragon. At Lucky Dragon, they are going to have a world-class tea house and tea garden, and we’re helping them do their tea program. They came in and they said, ‘We want to have the most impressive tea program in all of the country, if not all over the world,’ and we said, ‘Yeah, we can help you with that, no problem.’”