Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Caitlin Cash. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Caitlin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
I fell in love with milk tea while working in Suphanburi, Thailand in 2013. I was teaching English (shout out to my beautiful, lovely students at Sa-Nguan Ying High School), and every day I would grab a milk tea from the 711 or the local boba shop. I loved discovering new flavors and tea types as I traveled around Southeast Asia. When I moved back to Austin, I really missed having milk tea in my daily routine – it’s the best. I realized I had two options – drive to a boba tea shop or make it myself every time I wanted one.
I’m more of a doer, so I turned my tiny home kitchen into a test kitchen and got moving. Many months of trial and error and lots of spilled milk later, I landed on something that I felt proud of and wanted to share. Whenever friends or family would come over, I’d make them milk tea and force them to try all of my latest concoctions. Lots of excellent feedback later, the train picked up speed more and more as I served milk tea to friends and family, and those folks shared it with their circles. This was never supposed to be a business, but here we are! I launched this company officially in late fall of 2019, right before the pandemic hit. That ended up being a pretty rough time to start a small business, so we stepped back and worked for several months on our packaging and branding. We realized that we only had a split second to grab a customer’s attention on the shelves and that the packaging was the physical home for our milk tea. It needed to be simple enough to understand but unique enough to stand out. We worked with an amazing designer to bring our vision to life – while paying homage to the roots of milk tea. We wanted to incorporate anime-esque influences with the hand logo and concepts from traditional Japanese wood block printing with the color gradient and imperfection of the headers on the bottle. A friend of mine took some beautiful photos of the product in a really messy photoshoot, and after several weeks of attempting my hand at a website, we were in business!
I wanted Kinship Milk Tea to be widely available to people and feel approachable and playful. I decided to opt out of the traditional DTC method that a lot of beverage start ups are doing, and go straight to the cold fridges at small grocery stores and coffee shops. In the spring of 2021, I made up about 300 bottles of milk tea, put them in coolers, and drove them all over Austin. I walked into stores that I wanted to partner with, introduced myself, and just asked them to try the milk tea. It was so amazing meeting all of the cashiers, managers, buyers, and shop owners along the way, and pretty quickly we started to get put on shelves all around town. It brings me so much joy to serve milk tea to the Austin community and to ride the roller coaster of the small business club.
We set out to create a delicious non-dairy milk tea, made with high quality loose leaf tea and only a touch of sugar. We found that most milk teas on the market – either at boba shops or canned in specialty grocers – were much too sweet and used low quality tea. We strongly believe that the tea should be the main star of the show, and we wanted to push the boundaries of traditional milk tea flavors by surprising and delighting our customers.
We settled on Earl Grey Milk Tea as our OG – she’s a classy lady, silky smooth and floral, with hints of lavender, orange peel, and shortbread cookies. Right when you open the bottle, you can smell the perfume of the tea, and your first sip tastes like spring. It’s refreshingly light and not nearly as creamy as most customers think it will be. We wanted to create an easy drinking afternoon pick up me that our customers reach for instead of another cup of coffee – a beverage to refresh and re-energize you, to bring a smile to your face.
Our second flavor is Wuyi Oolong Milk Tea – a mellow and nutty tea with hints of butterscotch, toasted hazelnuts, and your grandma’s apricot jam. If we are categorizing them according to seasons, this tea is fall forward. It’s ever so slightly savory and sweet at the same time, with the perfect blend of flavors and a delightful mouthfeel. We love introducing more people to Oolong!
Milk tea is by absolutely no means a new product – it’s been consumed all over the world for ages. We wanted to create something that felt right to us in the hot Texas climate – not too sweet, not too creamy, dairy free, and most importantly insanely delicious. The best part of our day is watching new customers take their first sip – it gets us every time. We are authentically ourselves and love connecting with our customers, retail partners, and other CPG brands.
Caitlin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
It’s funny to look back on the origins of starting this company because I never set out to create a business. I made milk tea purely for the joy of it, and I wanted to share it with others. A lot of my friends in Austin started ordering milk tea from me and taking it to work, and then their co-workers would reach out and ask if they could buy some. I kept saying – well, it’s not actually for sale! I had to make a decision at some point in the journey whether to go for it or dial it back, and I decided to go for it!
It truly takes a village, and our story is no different. There have been so many instrumental people in the Kinship circle, and I couldn’t have done it without them. The packaging was designed by a dear friend of mine, the tasting notes on the bottle were done by a sommelier friend because I wanted it to read more like a wine bottle in the flavor profile, and the color palette ideas originally came from a floral designer friend. A close friend of mine shot our first (and only) studio shoot and helped me bring the vision to life. My sweet Dad retired in 2021, and I immediately put him to work driving our deliveries. He started a fake company called Dad’s Delivery Service and the store teams really care for him and vice versa. I made him a t-shirt that says Dad’s Delivery Service on the front and on the back has a caricature of him holding a bottle of Kinship with the words #1 Dad on it. He wears it for deliveries and it makes me so happy to see him out there around town stocking shelves, talking to customers, and establishing connections with the stores we partner with. At some point in time, my entire family and extended friend group has had a hand in the creation in one form or another. I am most proud of the community that has been at the center of Kinship from the very beginning and the community that we continue to build, one customer at a time. It is such an honor to talk to customers of the brand and hear what they love about it and how it makes them feel. Working markets is a blast because you can introduce people to the product and actually watch them try it for the first time – it’s amazing to see their reactions and explain more about the milk tea itself and the brand.
It’s been an incredible thing to see this company, with humble origins, grow outwardly and almost outgrow you as a founder. When I first started it, a lot of my friends would buy it from stores because they wanted to support me and they knew me as the founder. Now, it is a living, breathing entity that is completely separate from me as a person. That’s magical. Most of our customers have no idea who I am or the story of the brand, and that brings such a smile to my face knowing that these little milk tea bottles are out there doing their thing!
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the biggest lessons I have learned through the process of starting Kinship Milk Tea is that you can’t dwell on decisions too much or time will pass you by. When I first started, I scrutinized over every single detail and decision and went back and forth and back and forth until there was nothing left to ponder. I wasted a lot of time, and in small business, everything is constantly in flux anyway. You can spend countless hours creating packaging or figuring out the dimensions for your tamper proof cap, only to have them change 2 months later when you realize you need to add something for example. The biggest piece of advice I would go back and give myself would be to make the best decision you can in the moment and just keep moving forward. The world moves way too fast for us to weigh every single decision as if it were the make or break. Make the decision that you think is best and go with it!
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
My family is local to Austin, and it was really important to me to partner with shops that were also local. I am a strong believer that rising tides lift all boats, and I want to support both the shops that we partner with as well as our shelf mates that we sit next to in the fridge. One of the coolest marketing campaigns we did was this past February – Love Letters to Austin. I took a polaroid camera around to all of our shops that we are carried in and interviewed either the shop owner, buyer or manager. I wanted to know more about the people that we interact with on a regular basis – how long have they lived in Austin, what brought them to that point in their career, what are their hobbies, what are some of their favorite Austin brands. We highlighted them on our Instagram throughout the month of February and took their photos in their element, and it brought me so much joy. We look at our store teams as our partners – we help each other every single day. They are our teammates, and it felt so amazing to give them a platform to talk about themselves as well. It really brought us closer with a lot of these teams, and at the end of the interviews, we asked them to name some of their favorite restaurants around town. We were able to pay it forward and drop off milk tea to the places that they listed for their staff to enjoy. It was such a fun project that really felt like we were building deeper connection and community!
Contact Info:
- Website: kinshipmilktea.com
- Instagram: @kinshipmilktea
Image Credits
Studio shoot – Nicole Slevin