Brewing an Empire

Experts have long touted tea as a healthier alternative to sugary drinks and even flavored water. That was the catalyst behind Martin Ekechukwu’s launch of Village Tea Co. Distribution Inc. out of Dallas in 2009. “The baseline for everything we focus on is health and wellness,” says Ekechukwu. “It was all about combining these things with really flavorful products.” Sugar-saturated drinks like sodas, lemonades, and fruit punches can be detrimental to the body, notes the 35-year-old health-conscious entrepreneur. About half of the U.S. population age 2 and older consumes sugary drinks daily. But in spite of consumers’ love affair with sweetened beverages, the world’s most consumed drink is water, followed by tea. That bodes well for Ekechukwu, whose love for tea coupled with his passion for health helped him mold Village Tea into a successful wholesale provider of organic loose-leaf blends. The teas come in 23 flavors (a wide variety of white, red, green, oolong, and black teas) that are packaged in 100% recyclable and biodegradable containers. Village Tea also makes eco-friendly mobile teapots, allowing customers to have freshly brewed tea on the go.

Ekechukwu and his Village Tea team spend months every year traveling to global tea farms and meeting with farmers to create his brand of blended teas. He has relationships with three local packaging suppliers that warehouse his inventory, selling his tea to distributors and retail stores, including Whole Foods Market and The Vitamin Shoppe. Consumers can also buy Village Tea directly online.

During its inaugural year in business, Village Tea generated $69,000 in sales revenue. Revenues for 2011 reached $368,383 and Ekechukwu is predicting nearly doubling sales to top $750,000 in revenues for 2012.

Village Tea is attracting the attention of celebrities such as film and Broadway actress Anika Noni Rose and R&B singer Deborah Cox, who recently become a company spokesperson and a business partner (investing an undisclosed amount). “What really resonated with me about Village Tea Co. is the quality of the product. The company’s philosophy fit my philosophy, which is about being green,” says Cox. “And to find out that it was an African American-based company, that was just like icing on the cake.”

Breaking into the tea business hasn’t been easy for Ekechukwu, who spent a large part of his childhood in the Czech Republic and was introduced to a variety of loose teas by his grandmother.

It was only natural for him to start with something he knew well when he took the leap of faith to set up shop. He founded the company and started running the Village Tea brand after having spent several years managing multimillion-dollar corporate consumer brands. He was able to finance the company with $750,000 combined from his personal savings and funds from a private investor.

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But getting tea suppliers to take him seriously was a major barrier starting out. “I called often and I sent them presentations. I sent them mock-ups of what we have. I sent them samples of our product line,” says Ekechukwu. That persistence paid off. After facing some initial rejection, he found a supplier willing to take a chance on a fledgling company.

Once Ekechukwu cleared that hurdle, he was able to develop and hone his product. He pored over research and analysis that highlighted the health benefits of tea, and worked with a laboratory that helped him determine if he’d be able to replicate those benefits with his ingredients. “There are a bunch of studies about the healing properties of tea and the healing properties of tea ingredients,” he says. “So I used those as the foundation of developing the product line in making sure we’re hitting those health and benefit points.”

Promoting Village Tea at trade shows is what helped get the product into national retail stores. “We lived and breathed by trade shows,” he says. “Our first account was Whole Foods. We picked up the Rocky Mountain region [about 30 stores in total]. That was on the first day of the trade show,” back in 2009, he says. Over the next year, Vitamin World and The Vitamin Shoppe also picked up Village Tea. And today, Ekechukwu’s loose-leaf tea blends are in nearly 1,000 stores nationwide. “Trade shows are an amazing tool to help push the brand. We try to do one tea expo a year whenever we can.”

Those trade shows have even helped Village Tea go international. The company now has its product in more than 30 stores abroad. This was made possible by a Latin American distributor who approached Ekechukwu about selling to grocery stores in Costa Rica.

However, it took about a year from the time the foreign distributor reached out to Ekechukwu before Village Tea could legally export its products.  The challenge is that every country has different rules and regulations on imports, says Ekechukwu. “You have to get the ingredients translated into that local country’s language. And that has to be sent to the embassy of that respective country,” he explains. “After that, there’s still lots of red tape to maneuver to do business abroad. It’s not an easy route. It took us about three months for paperwork, and four months just to get regulators in Costa Rica and Guatemala to look at the product line. Then it took another four to five months for them to come back and approve everything.” Today, exports make up about 12% of Village Tea’s business.

The company’s intense efforts to get its tea into as many retail stores as possible are all part of a greater plan. “We’re trying to position ourselves to get bought by a larger company,” says Ekechukwu. He says this will help Village Tea grow bigger and faster than what he would be able to do on his own. He’s also looking to offer Village Tea franchises. “My motivation is delivering a legacy,” says Ekechukwu. “I was always taught you have to leave your mark somewhere.”