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, owner of the Village Tea Company brand of premium loose leaf teas and tea accessories. “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 36-year-old health-conscious entrepreneur.
The Village Tea Company brand is currently available in several major retailers in North America, including Vitamin Shoppe, Whole Foods, and Amazon. Village Tea producers are also available of the company’s website, www.villageteaco.com.
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. With the increased emphasis on health and wellness in the US market, the tea industry has seen exponential growth over the past five years. With the recent %620 million Starbucks acquisition of Teavana and the ever increasing popularity of gourmet and boutique tea brands, Village Tea is positioned to grow exponentially.
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 tea) 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.
During its inaugural year in business, Village Tea generated $69,000 in sales revenue. Revenues for 2011 reached $368,383 and Ekechukwu nearly doubled sales to top $750,000 in revenues in 2012.
Breaking into the tea business wasn’t 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.
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.â€
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.â€Those trade shows 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 has an end game, which is to position itself to get brought by larger company. Ekechukwu says this will help Village Tea grow bigger and faster than what he would be able to do on his own. This past summer, DC Brands International (OTC:HRDN), which produces a number of energy drink lines, acquired a minority interest in Village Tea.
The move helps to increase sales of Village Tea’s our product line through existing channels of distribution while expanding the footprint of the brand into new accounts, says . It also allows Village Tea to leverage DC Brands resources to explore brand extension opportunities into new categories such as branded bottled beverages and co-branded tea infused nutritional beverages.
Village Tea recently executed a multi-year licensing agreement with Verite Retail Group, LLC, a division of minority owned private equity firm, Verite Capital Partners, LLC, for the North American licensing rights to develop and operate Village Tea Company branded retail stores as well as the brand’s new e-commerce platform. VRG will operate Village Tea Company’s direct-to-consumer retail platform as, Village Tea Direct. Over the next five years, VRG plans to open and operate over 100 retail stores in various formats as well as re-launch and manage the brand’s e-commerce platform.