Web Feature: Is This the Apple Store of Tea?
Well-known Adagio sees retail as product ‘playground’By Chris Ryan
Founded in 1999, New Jersey-based Adagio Teas has carved out a niche for itself in the tea world, selling its product online and in grocery and retail stores, as well as wholesale to other tea shops. The company is now expanding to brick and mortar with the construction of its first retail store, to be located in Chicago. The shop will carry Adagio’s full line of teas and teaware and will also offer tastings and other hands-on experiences. The project is led by Charles Cain, a former executive of German tea company TeaGschwendner who helped that company with its U.S. expansion and opening of several Chicago stores. Cain is detailing Adagio’s retail process at www.tearetailer.com, and he talks with Fresh Cup about his goals for the new store, maintaining a blog and more.
Q: Why did Adagio choose Chicago for its first retail store?
A: There’s a good cross section of competition in the tea business here, so we felt that it was a good opportunity for us to test the model in a market where we can be sure of solid competition and know that, when we look at our numbers, these are not derived in a vacuum.
Q: With Adagio already well known, what’s the goal for the shop?
A: Success can be defined several ways for us. Obviously we want the individual store to be profitable, but aside from that, the store is a showcase for us. I would liken our approach to the physical retail space to Apple’s approach with their stores. They’re less concerned with how many units a particular store sells and more concerned about how many people they’re able to touch with the brand.
And so for Adagio, we’re a company that never really had the opportunity to sit across the table from the consumer. We’ve always been separated by distribution or the Internet. So this gives us a chance to set up what we’re calling a playground for tea. We are trying to create theater and create an experience so that all of our existing customers and all of the tea curious out there can come in and really dip their hands into the product—smell, touch, see, blend their own teas.
There’s a barrier of uncertainty between your average customer who’s used to tea bags and this premium, gourmet product that seems a little bit esoteric. We believe that if a customer is able to really experience and enjoy the tea, we can remove those barriers and remove that uncertainty. And we’ll dramatically increase what people end up buying. So we’ll really slow down the process—we’ll have more staff, more space and really encourage people to get into the product rather than just coming in, shopping and leaving, like a tea grocery store.
Q: Do you think this model will translate to multiple Adagio stores?
A: We’d like it to. The question right now is making sure that we’ve really refined the model—that we know what we’re doing and know it will work. The next step will be deciding whether we should open a very small number of flagship stores in each major market or if there’s an opportunity for an Adagio store in some of the secondary markets. Will you see it in Cleveland, Columbus or Toledo? We don’t know yet. And it’s not necessarily critical to our success or failure, but the decision really hasn’t been made what the optimal number of tea shops is.
Q: What are you hoping to accomplish by writing about this process in the blog?
A: The idea for the blog came from having this conversation internally: How do we convince all of our wholesale partners that we are not after them and their business? And one of the best ways to do that was just to share the details. As we get closer—even before the store opens—I’ll share the floor plans and designs and what we’re paying for furniture and all sorts of stuff. It will really be an open book. And some of the big competitors may learn a little bit from what we’re doing, but they’re already doing that themselves, so there’s really not a whole lot they’re going to be able to use. People who can use this data are the new tea entrepreneurs who are looking at getting into the business, who we really want to work with on the wholesale side, and they will open in the Toledos and Clevelands of the world, where we may never get.
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