With a nod to John Lennon for the quote I adapted for my title, I shake my head in amazement and exhale: Whew! What a year! Or, more to the point, what a half-year!
I find myself scrambling about on this last day of 2010, trying to complete so many things before that fateful midnight ball-drop and chime. I was working on an Archive Home Page for our e-newsletter, Sipping Notes, as well as trying to finally compose another Sipping Notes so that there would be something to archive--when I truly realized how long it had been since KTeas last put out a Sipping Notes or posted on this blog.
It's like the roller-coaster of life suddenly changed course in July, embarking on a series of wild turns and inclines and mad plunges, and while I adore roller-coasters, this one was proving difficult just to hang onto! In an odd way, the roller-coaster seemed to slow down, or at least the ride smoothed out a bit, just as The Holidays began. I thought that meant we'd get a chance to play catch-up on things like Sipping Notes, the blog, running some specials for the holidays on the website and at our two outlets. But not so: I got sick---nothing life-threatening, don't worry; just the flu, but stubborn, persistent, knock-me-on-my-fanny & then after I thought I was "better" and could resume both personal holiday activities and KTeas business activities, knock-me-back-on-my-fanny-and-laugh-at-me-for-thinking-I-could-resume-my-life kind of flu. Since KTeas consists presently of just two people and one of them has a "day job", having the other person out of commission for numerous weeks kind of puts the kibosh on doing anything extra!
Upon my realization this afternoon on New Year's Eve, allow me to use this blog as an End-of-Year Letter to fill you in on what's been happening while we've always had a cuppa at hand to see us through . . .:
Perhaps the most dizzying happening was when KTeas was informed that one of our suppliers had changed their business strategy and would no longer focus on wholesale clients. We gather that they wish to concentrate on and expand their retail and franchise activities. While they have not cut all ties with their existing wholesale clients, they have instituted some new policies and procedures to help them manage the wholesale side of things with less focus while they divert their energies to their new business strategies, and several of those new policies essentially make it too difficult for small businesses like KTeas to continue working with them. That may be intentional, to eliminate their wholesale client base through attrition, or it may not.
At any rate, that development has caused KTeas to create a new category on our website for Limited Quantity, While Supplies Last teas. All of the teas we get from that supplier will not be restocked when quantities on hand are exhausted. So check it out, see if any favorites are there and get them "while supplies last".
We have adopted the outlook with this development that we are simply retiring a few old products to make room for some of the exciting new products we have coming in! We have already begun to receive Hawaii-grown teas, mentioned in the July 2010 Sipping Notes. (As soon as we get the archive home page operational, we'll make sure Of Life and Tea includes a link to it so that you can see earlier Sipping Notes to catch references like that one.) We will soon be receiving single-estate teas directly from Ceylon (Sri Lanka, but the former colonial name has "stuck" with its teas) and from India: both the Assam region and the Darjeeling region. We cannot wait to share these wonderful new teas with you, especially the Drinking Tea In Harmony With the Seasons program that the estate in India, comprising both the Assam and the Darjeeling estates mentioned, has instituted which will allow us to pre-order teas from upcoming harvests so that those teas will be shipped to us within 3 weeks of being on the bush. Talk about fresh!
We also mentioned in the last Sipping Notes that Ed and Kathryn achieved the 1st Level of Certification by the Specialty Tea Institute, in June, immediately following the World Tea Expo. In August, Kathryn was able to attend and successfully complete Level 2 Certification.
Readers of Sipping Notes have noticed that KTeas partnered with Simply Elegant Gift Baskets to provide tea-inclusive gift baskets for all your gift-giving needs. Another happening threw us for a loop when the owner of Simply Elegant Gift Baskets found out she had to move elsewhere when her husband had the good fortune to get a new job in a different city. Happy for them both, to be sure, we floundered for a bit. To our rescue bounded a new company, formed by mutual friends of the owner of Simply Elegant! B.J. and Dee have each been involved in the making of gift baskets in their own businesses, and they rallied to provide the Simply Elegant owner with reliable referrals for her local customers: Southern Charm Gift Baskets. Southern Charm has already produced some striking gift baskets which include or consist entirely of KTeas products, some of which you can see on the KTeas Facebook Page.
KTeas has been involved in numerous activities over these last months, such as doing Tea Samplings at The Shoppes @ River's Edge, giving presentations to groups like the Silver Sneakers Lunch-n-Learn at the Baxter YMCA, being present at vendor blenders & festivals at Celebration Cottage, the Baxter Village Fall Festival, the Decadent Dreams Chocolate Festival to benefit Keystone Substance Abuse Services (where our chocolate flavored rooibos and mate proved very popular in the sampling tent!), donating iced tea and scone samples to the Twelve Days of Christmas Charity Benefit, recording a couple of radio spots to sponser holiday programming on WRHI AM 1340 & FM 94.3 and Interstate 107FM . . . just to name a few.
One of the matters we want to cover in the upcoming Sipping News is to get the word out that after much deliberation, we have finally devised a customer loyalty program for our website. We tried so hard to come up with something unique and original, but we finally realized we were making it far too complicated. We recognized that as consumers ourselves, our favorite customer appreciation programs all did basically the same thing: for every retail dollar we spend at the company, be it an online business, a movie theater, a chocolate shop, what-have-you, we are earning a reward or a thank-you, whether they simply track the $ or give us points for the $, and when we reach a certain level, usually $100 spent, we get some kind of discount, often simply a gift certificate for $10, or 10% of what we spent. So we decided the KISS principle worked best: Keep It Simple to Savor the Tea, or KISS the Tea. Look for that to be implemented in 2011.
Not exactly tea related, but something else that occupied us a great deal in these last months is our dancing. We finally, after 2+ years of taking lessons and loving it at DanceSport Carolina, we participated in a competition that our school put on: the Cosmopolitan Classic, on September 26. A great deal of preparation went into that incredible experience. No sooner was that out of the way, than we began preparing for our "recital" in our dance school's Christmas Party Showcase "Dancing In a Winter Wonderland" on Dec. 4, this year with the theme "A Century of Dance". We are dancing into the new year as well as ushering in 2011 to a raised cup of cheer/tea!
All of the above gives you a good "taste" of what has been occupying our attention in this last half of 2010.
Now I'll sign off for 2010. See you next year!
