12 years, 6 months ago-
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More more more 😉
Hard to put a number on it.
Enough variation in style and quality so there is something for every customer. And enough change and stability to satisfy those that always want something new and those that want their familiar tea.
I know tea shops with a nice collection of ~200 teas, but with a price limit of 10,- euro and I know a few special tea shops with 10-20 teas of higher quality.
So I think it depends on the market targeted.
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My whole range and a few single estate teas!What more could you want?
Our previous tea shop had 164 teas (about 90 of them pure camellia sinensis), 48 coffees, 66 herbals and 3 kinds of hot chocolate. Sadly, tea made up 4% of our beverage turnover, and a quarter of that was English Breakfast.
Our coffee was excellent and it was mostly our own blends that sold. The standard of coffee we offered was excellent, even given the high standards generally here in Adelaide, made with dairy-fresh non-homogenised milk. All espresso here of course, percolators etc are something you might find at a cheap hired room in a community centre.
But it was very distressing how little tea we sold.
In terms of retail, though, (ie bulk tea and coffee beans to take home or to the office) tea was 45% of our turnover. I guess people felt that they needed our expertise to have a good coffee, but could make themselves a good tea at home.
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I didn’t count but estimate we have around 60-70 in Life in Teacup. But quite a few of the green teas are seasonal and would be sold out by summer.
I have been thinking of exactly the question Xavier asked. I feel my problem is, I want a lot of teas, and would include more teas that I should in our web store. I think it’s the best for the future of the store and for my own mental health :-p to keep the operation small. So the plan for the coming year is to cut out some teas without cutting out either the favorite ones or the least expensive ones.
Also I’ve realized that storage and handling of some teas (such as puerh) are so much easier than storage and handling of some others (typically green tea). So starting from this year, we are experimenting on shifting most of our green teas to pre-orders and end our prestigious green tea stock as early as possible during the year. So during the rest of the year we will only maintain a few “good deal” green teas and focus on oolong and puerh for the rest of the year. This is the plan I’ve been pondering for a long time. We will see how it works in this year 🙂
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@It depends on sales volume. If you stock too wide of a variety, you risk some teas going stale before they are sold.
On the other hand, having a wide variety, provided your price is good compared with your competitors, can draw tea drinkers to your shop, even if they end up buying the same teas that they always buy. 🙂 Many folks like the idea of having that variety available to them.
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@*I think that for each shop/teahouse/etc. that number is going to depend on what turnover is, and I think it will vary a lot by market. It’s great to have extensive stock, but really bad to have teas that don’t move fast enough to remain fresh. Our shop has about 80, which is still manageable, but we don’t buy green teas in large quantities so we can replenish them frequently.
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