A Rare Tea Company Building a Rare Community
Rare Tea’s passion is a cup of perfectly infused tea. What goes into making the perfect cup? They believe it’s loose leaf tea crafted only by skilled men and women from Malawi, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Himalayas, and beyond through best direct trade practices. No pesticides, herbicides, additives, flavorings, or tea bags which often have bleaches, glues, and microplastics. Tea that exceeds expectations.
Henrietta Lovell, fondly known as the Tea Lady, founded Rare Tea Company in 2004. Her vision? An independent company that sources and supplies the world’s best loose leaf tea direct from farmers and their tea gardens. Lovell passionately believes in delivering quality loose leaf tea that tastes amazing, is good for you and good for the people who make it.
“Rare Tea is fully direct trade, so we don’t use any brokers,” CTO James Robinson says. “We work directly with farms we know.”
Rare Tea’s sustainably and ethically sourced tea—which they not only sell but teach about via their often sold-out Tea Masterclasses—can be found in hundreds of restaurants, cafes, and hotels around the world, including Claridge’s, the luxury hotel known for its legendary afternoon tea. The honor of having its tea served at the finest establishments is only eclipsed by Rare Tea’s joy in building global relationships with its partner farmers who benefit from setting their own prices and from the educational scholarships Rare Tea provides via Rare Charity.
Brewing Up a Storm
Though Rare Tea has been successfully selling quality loose leaf tea to thousands of customers for over 20 years, the small but mighty team of 13 has weathered a few bitter-tasting storms. Take, for instance, the sunsetting of their well-loved inventory and management platform TradeGecko after it was discontinued by Intuit in 2023. While the Rare Tea team had no choice but to swallow such sour news, it was made worse by the fact that this was the second time in two short years they had to replatform. Prior to TradeGecko, the company utilized Openbravo.
Losing two software platforms was reason to drown their sorrows in a cup of Rare Tea’s Soothe-Me blend tea, but the team quickly recovered with the help of Simon Thompson, from Sitech Industries.
Thompson had played a pivotal role in the implementation of TradeGecko (the first inventory management software on their list), but when it became obsolete, the decision to go with Cin7 Core was a no-brainer.
Says Thompson, “Cin7 is an off-the-shelf product. It does what it does exceptionally well, and we don’t have to make it bespoke.”
In other words, Cin7’s features and functionality fit Rare Tea’s specialized needs and not the other way around. Cin7 Core already had integrations built for the platforms they used, including their purchasing platform, CartRover (an essential feature for their United States warehouse), Shopify, and more.
Because Rare Tea has a small but mighty team, order fulfillment and distribution is handled by third parties throughout the supply chain, from the farms to packaging to warehouses. This means that their workflow processes are complex but it’s no problem for Cin7, which helps them manage every aspect of the product from bud to brew.
“The fears that I had about us having to dance to Cin7’s drum beat rather than our own were completely allayed when we worked out that pretty much everything is possible with a little bit of thought, especially with Simon’s help.”
Infusing the Benefits of Cin7
Starting the process in December 2021, Robinson and Thompson implemented Cin7 in 12 weeks, using what Thompson calls Sitech Industries' “Workflow-Driven Implementation”.
“The onboarding process should be very, very painless as long as you follow that method,” says Thompson.
This was true for Rare Tea, who began happily receiving orders by February 2022. Since then, the tea company has processed 50,000 orders (that’s a lot of cups of tea!) and has reaped the benefits, including:.
- Automatically building personalized bundles (they sell their loose tea leaf product in recyclable, reusable tins) in Cin7, saving them time and effort.
- Automating production workflow (including assembly and disassembly) as well as blending raw materials into completed products through a packing service (while being able to add service charges, incorporate them into purchase orders, and producing a functional cost at the end).
- Flagging orders that have issues (e.g., missing postcode or shipping rate, a customer is under their order limit, etc.) and automatically sending an email to the customer support team, who then fix it before the order gets to the warehouse.
“Third-party warehouses charge for everything, so anytime an order comes back, there’s a new charge. By flagging potential issues in our orders, we were able to cut that down by more than half.”
When it comes to Cin7’s reporting, Robinson says, “The sales team was able to use data that they pulled from Cin7’s reports to determine which accounts were worthwhile to pursue.”
But Rare Tea’s Cin7 benefits don’t end there. Robinson and Thompson praised Cin7’s inventory insights, seamless workflows, consistent uptime, and “rock solid” integration with Shopify as well as the Rare Tea team’s ability to:
- Look at detailed logs and have enough information to track and fix a wrong order.
- Send out packing slips automatically vs. manually so that both the sales team and customer know what’s coming and when.
- Have a say in Cin7’s roadmap through Cin7’s Customer Advisory Council.
These were, according to Thompson, unsurprising as well as much appreciated benefits, but he says there were two things that did surprise them: Cin7’s distribution of landed costs on purchase orders (something TradeGecko didn’t provide) and their ability to take discounts as either an additional line charge or reduce the price of the item through the Shopify integration.
“It was refreshing to see someone put some thought into having a choice in that scenario.”
Steeping Itself in Success
As to what’s next for Rare Tea, Robinson reveals that they’re investigating the possibility of a new warehouse—and Cin7 is making it an easy endeavor.
“It’s very nice because all we have to do is click, add location, give it a name, a price list, and do a stock transfer, and then it appears. As long as there’s an API connection out there, then it’s golden. It will take me half an hour to set up a new location in Cin7.”
With Cin7, along with help from Thompson and Sitech Industries, Rare Tea is focusing their attention on establishing sip-worthy relationships with their customers and supporting vital farming communities, secure in the knowledge that their inventory management needs are being taken care of completely.
