Mel Ziegler - The Republic of Tea: How an Idea Becomes a Business

The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told

Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders

MEL ZIEGLERBILL ROSENZWEIGPATRICIA ZIEGLER

The Republic of Tea: An Idea Becomes a Business

Mel Ziegler, Bill Rosenzweig, Patricia Ziegler

Published by The Republic of Tea, Inc.

5 Hamilton Landing, Suite 100

Novato, California 94949

www.republicoftea.com

The Republic of Tea was originally published in hardcover by Currency Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., in 1992. (ISBN: 0-385-42056-0)

First Currency Paperback Edition: October 1994. (ISBN: 0-385-42057-9)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Currency hardcover edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ziegler, Mel.

The republic of tea : letters to a young entrepreneur / Mel Ziegler, Bill Rosenzweig, Patricia Ziegler.1st ed.

p. cm.

A Currency bookT.p. verso.

1. Tea tradeManagementCase studies. 2. Retail tradeManagementCase studies. 3. New business enterprisesManagementCase studies. I. Rosenzweig, Bill. II. Ziegler, Patricia.

III. Title.

HD9198.A2Z54 1992

eISBN: 978-0-615-62891-2

www.republicoftea.com

Copyright 1992 by Mel Ziegler, Bill Rosenzweig, and Patricia Ziegler

Charter copyright 1994 by The Republic of Tea, Inc.

Authors Introduction copyright 2012 by Mel Ziegler

eBook Cover Design: Patricia Ziegler, Minister of Enchantment

eBook Editor: Todd B. Rubin, Minister of Evolution

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by Booknook.biz

For Josh Mailman

The authors gratefully thank and acknowledge Faye Rosenzweig for her gracious assistance and support, and for her warm, ever-steady, and always-open Tea Mind; Harriet Rubin for her incisive but gentle probes that captivated us and drove us to try to make more sense than we thought we could; Bruce Katz for his true friendship, his laser like intelligence, and for being Bruce Katz; Morton Janklow for his masterful ways; Stephen Yafa for his early sensitive reading and great advice; Nancy Bauch and Vic Zauderer for their keen eyes and enthusiastic hearts; Paul Saffo, Doug Menuez, Elliot Hoffman, Michael Whitacre, Eric and Suzy Schuman, Paul Hawken, and Don Joseph for their encouragement and assistance; Michael Spillane and Brian Writer for their patient teaching about camellia sinesis; Samuel Twining for his spirited talk about the tea business and for blending some damned fine teas that educated our palettes; and finally Sam Rosenzweig and Zio Ziegler for showing us that our Tea Minds go all the way down to our toes.

A moment of thanks for the pot. It gives up its emptiness for the tea. Is there a greater sacrifice?

The Minister of Leaves

Twenty years ago, it all beganwith a sip. As the reader will soon learn, it was a notable sip to chase away a wretched coffee-induced caffeine withdrawal. For hours, an invisible force had been stabbing me wildly inside my head. Exhausted, I made a cup of tea, gentle and warming, and it began to settle me. When the withdrawal expired and clarity resurfaced, I knew that I was finished with daily coffee forever. If by its mere absence coffee could wreak such misery as I had just experienced, there was no longer any illusion that I was having itrather it was having me. Resolved: I would instead drink tea. Teais different. It has half or less or no caffeine at all. It has a cleaner taste, not oily, carrying exotic and intriguing notes of the very gardens in which the leaves were grown.

Finding tea, another matter.

Twenty years ago in America, as Kleenex is to tissues, Liptons was to tea. A tea bag filled with the dustier dregs of orange pekoe leaves was what you were served even in the finest restaurants. Such was the American consciousness of tea. I wondered: How could this be? Why hadnt anybody thought to bring tea in all its nuance, tradition, tales and delightsit is, after all, the worlds second oldest productto the attention of Americans who, like me, hadnt even given it a second thought?

And so it was that I found tea and sipped my way into business. Having at the time just built and sold Banana Republic, I tended, for fun and profit, to confuse companies and countries. Accordingly, I named my new (ad)venture The Republic of Tea. In my new country, population one, I appointed myself Minister of Leaves. My wife, friend and lover, Patricia, installed herself as the Minister of Enchantment. Soon afterwards, an efficient young man named Bill Rosenzweig came along to take up the position of Minister of Progress. The three of us undertook a prodigious correspondence by an antediluvian device named the fax machine, buzzing ideas, sketches, musings, ruminations back and forthas we negotiated how to constitute the newly declared Republic of Tea. A friend, Bruce Katz, spied the pile of faxes and alerted Harriet Rubin, an editor at Doubleday, who appeared in our home and insisted that the faxes had to be published. Morton Janklow made the proper arrangements, the book advance funded the Republic of Teas treasury.

Bruce Katz added some funds of his own, which bought him the Ministry of Finance. As Bruce was more practical about these things than Patricia and I, he talked us out of our inclination to establish Republic of Tea as a retail establishment. Instead we would create a line of teas and distribute them broadly. In the process we would promulgate Tea Mind, which we saw as a sip-by-sip alternative to the rampant 24/7 gulp-by-gulp madness then just beginning to grip the land.

Make twenty-one teas, advised Bruce, and try to get as much shelf space as you can.

Shelf space? Now imagine those shelves in the early 90s. In even the best markets, tea got a shelf or two at the most. For black tea, it was Liptons or Twinings. For herbal teas, it was Celestial Seasonings, a brand founded by a Colorado hippie named Moe Siegel. Such was the real estate when Little Republic of Tea started to squeeze itself between them.

In virtually no time, the round Republic of Tea cans, with novel full leaf teas, colonized a considerable portion of tea-designated shelf space in gourmet and natural food stores throughout America. The demand began to outrun the supply and our ability to finance it.

By this point, the book had found its way to St. Louis, where a businessman named Ron Rubin discovered it in a bookstore, read it voraciously, and bought a ticket to California to meet us. This book changed my life, he proclaimed. Would you be interested in selling the company?

Having just had a baby, we decided nothing could make us happier than going home with our Tea Mind and spending open-ended time with our new daughter and her four-year-old brother. Ron purchased our shares and shortly afterwards Bills as well, and a new regime installed itself at The Republic of Tea.