How to go global

Our mission is simple.

We want to create a T2 generation on every continent, a community of advocates who are bound by their love of tea.

In order to do that well, we decided it was time to take the brand global three years ago. We’ve moved T2 from an Australian brand into international markets – we had to take it from a retail-store business into more diversified channels.

We picked 20 countries that we thought would have the most transference with Australia and would have a high level of resonance with a brand like T2. We then did some market attractiveness assessment – things like GDP, population and affluence – and married that with ease of entry, the regulatory environment, the legal environment and the competitive intensity. From there, we were able to rank those 20 markets.

The second thing we did was overlay it with the ecommerce landscape because that’s profoundly changing how you choose where to send or present your brand, which again changed the ranking.

We went to the UK, the US, to Singapore as our gateway to Asia and, most recently, to China. We now have 100 stores around the world, including Australia and New Zealand. We needed to get it right market by market and in some cases we learnt this the hard way and we had to course correct. In others, we got it really right and reaped the benefits quickly.

If you want to go global, you need to be data-enabled and IT-ready. So we spent a lot of time collecting, centralising and customising data to know what was valuable. It enabled us to become omni-channel – which was emotional for the T2 business because it has been a brand with its heart and soul in bricks and mortar. But if we wanted to be customercentric, we needed to be where customers were. Our ecommerce store serves 90 different countries. It allowed us to go into China with an ecommerce-first strategy.

T2 is about tea reimagined. But over the past three years, we’ve had to reimagine everything in our business. Reimagine the way we take the brand into new markets and present it in a way that makes sense. Reimagine our business model and be okay to walk away from the stuff that we thought was so important to us. And be okay to try something different. At T2 we believe that if it can be imagined, it can be done. And it can be done if we do it together.