What's in a name?

Changing the name of our most popular tea.

Last month I started noticing a strange trend in my sales. Indian Breakfast—the tea that’s long been our best seller online—wasn’t selling as quickly as our herbal teas in stores. I’d bike around Brooklyn and up through Manhattan, noticing our Peppermint and Ginger Turmeric almost gone while boxes of Indian Breakfast were still sitting there. It didn’t make sense. Black Assam tea, the base of most breakfast blends, is the most consumed tea in the world. So why was Indian Breakfast selling slower than our other blends?

Labeling the first few thousand boxes of Indian Breakfast with this little label applicator I got on Amazon.

For the past few months I’ve been gifting boxes of Raazi to writers on Substack to get feedback on the tea. The replies have been positive, and some have even featured the brand in their posts (if this is you—thank you!). But I did repeatedly hear one confusing response: Indian Breakfast didn’t have as many spices as people expected. They were looking for cardamom and ginger, flavors that would never be present in a breakfast blend.

The provenance, flavors, and beauty of tea are all so intertwined. Part of my motivation for starting Raazi was to build a brand that helped bring to light the origins of this timeless beverage. While the English surely receive credit for the propagation and growth of the tea trade—which once powered the global economy—the origins of an “English Breakfast” tea are really from the Indian subcontinent. So as the son of Indian immigrants, I consciously named our most popular tea “Indian Breakfast” rather than “English Breakfast” as a point of pride—Raazi was going to play a part in restoring a story lost to colonialism. First the tea, then we’d get our diamonds back. Baby steps.

But what I started to put together after biking around to stores and asking for feedback was that people were reading the word “Indian,” seeing “Tea,” and assuming this blend was a masala chai, rather than a black Assam tea. It forced me to weigh a deeply personal goal against something more grounded in reality.

Now I don’t know for certain if sales were slower because of the name of the tea. I never held a focus group or sent out a survey. But the shelves showed me how people were behaving—and honestly that’s the best data I can ask for. While the story behind the name is meaningful to me, there are other ways I’m telling stories about the ritual of tea—like through our Chaiwala series.

One of the joys of being a small business with few employees (just one, to be exact) is that you can make decisions quickly. So I fired up InDesign, changed the designs, and ordered a few thousand English Breakfast labels for my next production run.

In addition to changing labels on my next run, I printed small labels that stores could request for free if they wanted to change the name of current stock.

You might think this decision was brash or impulsive. Labeling my teas “Indian Breakfast” might have been a differentiator that helped get us on shelves in the first place. The story of an Indian-origin founder selling a product that highlights his heritage might have resonated with customers. All of those things are likely true, but the decision came down to two factors that I think are even more important:

1. The growth of our business should be led by our customers, and

2. When you’re wearing every hat, you have to place a premium on your time.

I could have split this SKU into two names and let retailers choose which they wanted or sold the Indian Breakfast online and the English Breakfast in stores. But the truth is that both options would have created a headache that I just can’t justify at this stage of business. There’s value in simplicity.

Another example of this is my website, which pushes a pre-determined “starter” bundle. I’m sure I’d sell more by letting customers customize their bundle or by testing which teas should go into it, both of which I’d love to do eventually. But doing them now is time away from reaching out to retailers and getting Raazi into more stores, and every new shelf we get onto represents a hundred new people who will encounter Raazi for the first time.

Highlighting the origins of tea is still important to me, as is telling stories about why I believe something as simple as a cup of tea can bring a lot of good into people’s lives. But continuing to fight for something that’s confusing to customers isn’t the best way to do that. I tried something, and it didn’t work in the way I wanted it to. That’s going to happen again—probably a lot. The important thing is to make the best call you can with what’s in front of you, trust it, and move on to the next.