We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mary Murkin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Mary, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I had wanted to own my own business since I was five years old—you might say it was the dream of a poor kid from the Midwest. Then life comes along with things like school, work, marriage, moving, kids………..and then homeschooling my two kids for thirteen years. After all of that, it was then that I got to focus on opening a business. In January of 2013 I first opened an art gallery shop to be able to showcase local artists’ art, as well as my own art. This was fun, but not fully gratifying. I knew that I wanted to develop something and create my own company from the ground up.
After having the art gallery business for one year, I then decided to create a tea company. I knew the name of it would be Carriage House Tea, which is named after the beautiful little carriage house that sits at the back of my commercial property. The main building on the property, which houses the art gallery and the tea shop, is a beautiful turn of the century yellow brick mansion that was built in 1917.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In this small southern town (and all over the southern United States), the tea of choice is known as “sweet tea.” I knew I had an uphill battle to try to introduce a line of fine luxury loose leaf tea to this area. However, I was determined to at least try. I began the tea company in January of 2014 with ten flavors of tea. Little by little, the tea customer base began to grow. I kept adding more teas every couple of months. By now, I have over 160 flavors of tea. The teas span the categories of black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu-erh tea, herbal tea, herb and fruit tea and rooibos.
Not only have I built a very busy brick and mortar tea business (with excellent foot traffic), but I sell online through my website: carriagehousetea.com and I have a steadily growing wholesale business with selling my teas to other businesses, which includes coffee shops, restaurants, whiskey bars, and boutique shops.
It seems like the most valuable thing to know is that I don’t take anyone or anything for granted. I appreciate any help, guidance, ideas that folks have provided to me over the years. I cannot express my complete thanks to all the folks who have been with me along this journey—–it takes lots of us “little folks” working together to make anything successful. For these and a number of reasons, I feel like I am right where I am supposed to be. My heartfelt gratitude goes out for making a little girl’s dreams come true all these years later.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
When I first opened my tea company, I knew that I had to do something to begin indoctrinating folks in this small southern town to the joys of brewing loose leaf teas and drinking them hot (as well as enjoying these luxury loose leaf teas chilled). I began having monthly tea tasting events. These were very well attended. I also began going around and doing tea lectures for various social and service groups in the area. I did social events at the YMCA and I participated in a number of local municipality health fairs with the tea. I began getting hired to do teas for wedding showers, museum fund raisers, church events, etc. In about a seven year period, this kind of exposure allowed the tea company to grow and expand the flavor offerings. It was a very exciting thing to see the company grow from the first ten flavors of tea to what is now around 160 flavors of tea. I continue to develop and add flavors as time permits.
The brick and mortar foot traffic was how it all began. Next I launched a website for nationwide shopping, carriagehousetea.com. The final piece of the growth strategy was to begin growing my wholesale end of the business. That has happened in wonderful ways. Some of the accounts find me, and some of the accounts I had to approach.
In all cases, very often I find that thinking outside the box provides me the most return for my efforts. Don’t just do what everyone else is doing. Find ways to make your business more interesting and find ways to make customers and companies enjoy what you have to offer.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
My process began with selecting a tea supplier and learning how to blend teas. Next came the very creative and fun aspects of the physical part of the product. I already had a name for the tea company and now I needed a very memorable and classy looking logo. I hired a marketing, branding and website development team of people to help me with these processes. Once the logo was created, I needed to select the container for the product. After selecting the container (which was quite a process of auditioning many containers to see what would work and what would be very attractive), we then had to design the product labels for all of the varieties of tea and various flavors that I was working with. After the physical product was in hand and photographed, then the website was built. Then we began building a social media presence for the company as well as advertising in local, regional and national publications. Along the way in this process, a business and trademark attorney assisted me by forming an LLC, buying insurance for the product, obtaining the state trademark and the federal trademark. Whew! Lessons that I have learned: Every bit of this process was very exciting and also that so much more work goes into creating even a small company/product than anyone could ever know unless you have traveled this path personally.
Contact Info:
- Website: carriagehousetea.com
- Instagram: carriagehousetea
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarriageHouseTea
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmbcVRL-qdzW2RbswbeD9kA/videos
Image Credits
Mary Murkin