Sunday, January 26, 2014

Storehouse Tea in the News

Crain's Cleveland Business December 9-15,  2013
Equitable Approach
Businesses that participate in Fair Trade face some challenges, but strongly believe there is an alternative way to do good
By Sharon Schnall


After meeting reporter Sharon Schnall at the Geauga Fresh Farmers Market one Saturday afternoon,  I was excited to get a Linked in invite as well as a phone call asking if she could interview me for a piece on businesses who practice Fair Trade. I am a strong believer in what you put out there comes back to you, so supporting Fair Trade was a no brainer for me. I am a female business owner who wants to be paid fairly for our high quality organic fair trade teas. I purchase Fair trade certified teas because it ensures that  the beautiful women who pick my tealeaves are being treated ethically and paid fairly too!  Supporting  Fair Trade is more than nice branding for my business, it's quite simply how the world  should be conducting business, fairly!


Crain's Cleveland Business January 13-19, 2014
Making a large Leap onto the Shelves
Companies can reap benefits from working with big-box stores, but there are plenty of challenges
By Sharon Schnall

 Storehouse Tea has been on the shelves of Whole Foods, Earth Fare and Market District stores around the state of Ohio for the past 2 years.  All of these stores include local companies like ours on their shelves but there are challenges.  Grocery stores are like mini retail spaces, it's all about location. We have to fight for consistent and decent shelf placement, a lot of times our product is moved to make way for the bigger brands who have marketing dollars to pay for advertising, prime shelf space and running sales and coupons. Often we are placed in areas of the store not anywhere near the tea aisle like in a "local section" making it hard for shoppers to find us let alone compare pricing. We pay a high percentage to these stores just to carry our teas and we invest time each month to demo our teas in their stores. The pay off has been slower than we thought, mostly because we are still building brand awareness and educating their customers of the health benefit  of loose leaf teas vs. tea bags. We are excited to launch our new packaging in the next 30-60 days , and hope to create  better brand awareness and visibility.  We will keep you updated on our progress. In the meantime, if you're having trouble finding our product in these stores or your happy that they are carrying our teas, please send us an email at info@storehousetea.com so we can forward them to the manager of that store.