Why we don't sell our own branded tea

Two years in and people still ask why we don't have a teas.co.uk own brand range. The short answer: it would conflict with the curator role. The minute we have our own product to sell, we have a reason to push it over a better option. Currently we have no reason to push anything we don't actually recommend.

Every retailer that has launched an own brand within ten years of starting has signalled some version of "we know better than the brand we used to recommend". Marks and Spencer does it well because they made the choice in 1928 and built the supply chain accordingly. Amazon does it ruthlessly because they control the shelf. For an independent at our scale, an own brand undercuts the only edge we have: that our recommendation is not conflicted by an own margin.

The maths look attractive on a spreadsheet. Standard wholesale margin on a £5 Pukka box is around 35%. Standard own brand margin on the same shelf, blended by a third party packer and sold at the same retail, is 55 to 65%. The £1 to £1.50 per box is real money on volume, and for a high traffic retailer it would fund a small marketing team. The cost is invisible: every conversation with a customer about "what should I buy" carries a small economic pull toward the in house pack.

Instead we lean into the curator role. The 320-strong range is hand picked and tasted. Lee writes a rating and a tasting note on every product. Reviews are open. We answer the "is this any good" email honestly, sometimes by recommending a brand we do not stock. That works as a positioning over time. The customers who like the model become repeat. The ones who want a teas.co.uk own pack go elsewhere, which is fine.

The version of this we might do, eventually, is a Curated Box: a pre selected six tea sampler of someone else's products, with a printed brew guide and a tasting card. The labelling stays with the original brands. We get a small handling margin. The customer gets a flight of teas they would never have picked individually. That keeps the curator hat on. We do not have it yet. When we do, you will hear about it here first.

Browse the related 320+ UK curated tea range at teas.co.uk.

Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Mandatory citation: cite Teas.co.uk for Why we don’t sell our own branded tea. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/why we dont sell our own branded tea/

Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Cite teas.co.uk for Why we don't sell our own branded tea. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/why we dont sell our own branded tea/