A new TW-based vendor popped up out of the Tea Table Discord, named Quiche Teas. You’ll notice that their prices are quite low, especially when put against other western facing vendors. This is because Quiche is dropshipping primarily from a Taizhong based vendor named Taishunhe with a relatively low markup. While dropshipping can sometimes be a negative term, in this case it is technically accurate and I definitely appreciate how transparent Quiche is about his sourcing. There is no pretense of Teas We Like level of deep curation, as he openly states he has not tried all the teas and is simply listing what Taishunhe tells him to. I’ve bought teas from Taishunhe before and they’re one of the more well known Taiwanese sources but selling them with a shopify site like Quiche Teas, makes it considerably more accessible and easy to order.

I often get asked if I would ever start a tea store. The answer has always been a pretty hard no. I love tea, I’m an entrepreneur in real life and I enjoy interacting with the community but it’s a difficult business to be in, especially if the goal is to make a living. Making samples sucks, shipping is a pain, and dealing with customers can be a real annoyance. And then there’s deciding what sort of markup.. Due to the labeled nature of pu’erh we often have some idea as to what the actual market price would be for those teas, by looking at taobao or Donghe (for Dayi). For many teas, you can find the teas for around half the price if the western vendor is reputable. Even that is a somewhat low markup and one option is for a vendor to markup the tea even higher (see 1 $45/10 units, 2 $12/10 units). Another way to avoid just being someone reselling pu’erh is to press your own tea which has a different price/market dynamic and is far more difficult to tell the original cost of production.

Low Markups in a Niche Market

Why not just charge a low markup?? Having low markups in a small niche market, means you have to make up for the lower margins with volume that the market probably won’t support on a regular basis. If you sell a cake for $100 and it cost you $75. You need to sell quite a few to make any significant profit.. This is where the hobbyist vendors have slid in. A vendor curator like Teas We Like, US-based Liquid Proust or someone like Emmett for Yangqing Hao. They are often tea enthusiasts first and can afford to sell with a lower markup than traditional vendors as they don’t need to make as much money as the sole source of their income.

Eastern-Facing Options

A certain level of tea obsessive ends up in the annals of Taobao searching for random 2005 productions or using facebook for the sole purpose of buying from Taiwan or Malaysian based tea sources (I confess). Why? Because the eastern market is more appealing when the alternative is western facing sources that are more restrictive and expensive. There is a massive amount of tea available and you can often get tea for quite a bit less. You are sacrificing a level of curation, sample availability, and ease for the potential of lower prices and a wider net. This is all quite stupid if you don’t know what you’re doing. However, if you’re OK with calculated risks it can become a default way of buying tea.

So how bad is the calculated risk? It depends on the arena you choose. Navigating untrusted taobao sources is one thing.. But if you had zero idea what you were doing and bought blindly and randomly at Quiche without ever having tried the tea, you’d almost certainly do much, much better than buying from a place like Jesse’s Tea House or Mei Leaf. Taishunhe might be a somewhat ordinary tea shop in Taiwan, but simply having a relatively vetted shop that is more Taiwan facing rather than western facing makes the value much better. The alternatives in the west are more limited. Even teas outside pu’erh (their bread and butter) like Yancha or TW oolongs have gotten praise as good value teas compared with western facing options.

Quiche Teas is another evolution from other, earlier hobbyist vendors. Ironically given their start as a hobbyist vendor that disrupted some of the popular vendors in value, I’ve seen some refer to TWL as a high markup vendor. While I don’t agree that TWL could be classified as high markup, it is true that there is still some markup and you can find some of their teas for less. Part of this is simply logistical. TWL sells teas shipped from Malaysia to Taiwan and slices cakes into quarters, things that cost money. At least for now a place like Quiche can offer teas for even less of a markup than these other vendors. Batches and storage may not be vetted to the same level, but that can be an OK trade off for a lower price. This is also a very new vendor so it’s also possible that Quiche finds being a vendor in this capacity is not worth the trouble and either shuts down or raises prices.