As I progress on my business journey I find myself encountering more and more difficult challenges and higher and higher obstacles.
As a runner and a rower I find myself drawing strength and motivation from all the miles spent on the road or the river and visualizing the hard work, determination and team work that has always pulled me through. Continue reading
During a recent interview I was asked ‘How have you funded yourself so far’ and part of my answer was:
“We both strongly believe that you can achieve a hell of a lot without having to spend a huge amount of money – it just takes a bit of creative thinking and patience.”
I received an email recently from a gentleman who had read my answer and said:
‘I’d really like to expand on that idea. There is a recent movement in Germany amongst young entrepreneurs and new startup companies that was initially set into motion by Guenter Faltin’s book “Brains versus Capital” called concept-creative entrepreneurship. Continue reading
The award ceremony for the Smarta 100 – to celebrate the 100 most disruptive, innovative and remarkable new businesses in the UK, was a brilliant night out.
As well as being named one of the Smarta 100, Bluebird was also nominated for an award on the night – Micro Business of the Year, which celebrates big things in business achieved by small teams like ours. Continue reading
Seen the cringey homemade video we made to enter Confessions of a Start Up?
One of the diary entries tells the story of us searching for the location of our flagship store.
Which got me thinking about the place the high street will play in our lives going forward and the nature of retail businesses because of it. Continue reading
It’s not just the clocks that have changed at The Nest this past month, there seems to be change everywhere.
The Royal Mail postage change (which is outrageous and probably going to sink many small online businesses) has forced us to change our packaging. We are making massive changes preparing for opening our first shop. We’re putting some of our loose leaf teas into silk bags for the first time(!) We did our first training session with a gorgeous place in Melbourne that started serving our teas last week. We are moving home and office soon also.
It is all change.
One thing that can always be relied upon to stay constant however, are the dinner table debates that go on in our household every time we get together. Easter was no exception. Continue reading
Apologies must be made for the lateness of this post. It has been MANIC! But that is no excuse for my poor attendance record and I hope you can all find it in your heart to forgive my blogging laziness.
But wait until you hear what we have been up to.
Actually we haven’t been up to much so far in 2013. Not in terms of getting in front of people and making tasty teas for lots of lovely Teabirds, which has made me a bit sad.
We have only been ticking over with our regular markets and the online stuff – which is starting to see a boost from all the people who found some Bluebird tea in their Christmas stocking and are coming back for more, which makes me happy.
We have a new newsletter called ‘The Bluebird Daily’ which you can take a peak at here if you so wish, and subscribe to it too if you so wish… if you’re a customer you have probably already had it but it seems to be going to some peoples junk boxes! Pesky technology!
Anyway, what else have we been doing? Well we have been ‘incubating’ (please excuse the ridiculous terminology here) and it has been an insightful but stressful time indeed.
For anyone who doesn’t know about incubating it’s just posh business jargon for taking a time out. Usually in a glamorous boardroom with industry experts and mentors to figure out what you are trying to achieve and how to achieve it going forward.
I guess it’s like an intensive health check for your business and you are supposed to come out with a full fitness plan for the next year or however long.
There are loads of companies that offer this service at a quite hefty price tag but we did it classic Bluebird style and rented a room in a rundown office block in a rundown area and locked ourselves in with nothing but a kettle, a small electric heater and huge floor to ceiling whiteboards on each wall.
It hasn’t been quite idyllic, partly because of the barbwire and double metal shutters, partly because there is a local street fighting club who train in the car park outside our window so every day at 12pm we are serenaded by shouts and grunts to the effect of: ‘Your not done yet lad, get yourself off the floor and pump that iron’, or my favourite is ‘pain is only temporary, quitting lasts a lifetime’.
We have been into the very depths of our souls searching for answers to questions that we weren’t expecting to have to answer so soon and it has been a little overwhelming at times.
We have been trying to further define the ‘why’ behind our ‘what’ and make sure that it speaks clearly to our customers. We have been trying to drill down into the assumptions we base our decisions upon and how reliable the evidence is that we use to support those assumptions and decisions. We have been trying to analyse and predict trends and customer behaviour as well as their wants and needs.
I warned you about the head hurt.
After all we started off just giving people good tea to try and spread some happiness.
It sort of feels like we started off pushing a steam train along a track with our own bare hands and that it has recently started running away full steam while we chase along behind trying to jump on board!
The really exciting thing to share with you is our experience with Dragon’s Den Nottingham. Now before you get carried away we didn’t meet Theo and we didn’t get onto the TV! But we did enter the local Nottingham version and we did get shortlisted.
So two weeks ago we went along to a very posh boardroom and pitched to 6 Nottingham business dragons. We prepared our Strawberry Lemonade iced tea which went down a storm and within 5 minutes the planned pitch had gone out of the window as we frantically tried to answer questions being fired from all over the room!
We walked out with 3 offers of mentoring and an offer for investment as well as being told we stood a good chance of winning the prize grant money.
It was an excellent experience, if a little daunting and the enthusiasm we received has only fuelled our passion and determination further.
In the end we did win a lovely novelty cheque (and a smaller real one!) and went back to visit The Nottingham who hosted and sponsored the event to serve up teas to their lovely staff.
We are now planning what to do with our grant monies but on the list is an application to The Great Taste Awards to try and get our amazing teas some much deserved awards too, a replacement for good old Edward (our midi van) who is falling apart at the seams, a bit of professional tweaking to the website and some product promotional photography to use on the website and to try and get us some press attention.
All in all it has been a good 2013 so far, but it is flying by super-fast! Spring is already on its way .. yippee.. which reminds me we have already developed over 20 new teas set to be launched at various times this year. There are some absolute beauTEAs (!) that I can’t wait to get on sale for you Teabirds.. the Spring Collection will be on sale towards the end of March but a sneak peak just for you is below:
Love + Tea
ThatBluebirdGirl
xXx
Hello!
I should probably introduce myself…. I’m the other half of Bluebird Tea Co.. I guess you could say I’m ThatBluebirdBoy.
I’ve been pestering ThatBluebirdGirl to update her blog for the last couple of days and finally she snapped and suggested I do it (those weren’t her exact words!). So for this edition you guys are lucky enough to get a guest blogger!
As I don’t usually write the blog and with Bluebird I often focus on the less interesting bits, I struggled to think about what to write. I had a suspicion people wouldn’t be interested in reading the reasons why we are considering changing the legal structure of our company or which free accounting program seems the best for us.
So I thought I would just write about what we are, and how we got here. We touch upon this on our website, but not very deeply. We explain what our philosophies are, but not so much why they are and I think that it’s important to understand why people think the way they do in order to really understand what they think. You would never guess I studied philosophy!
Hopefully by explaining why we say that Bluebird’s world is responsible, our people are fulfilled, our customers are exceptional and our tea is happy you will see that this isn’t just the normal marketing spin. So many companies say this now that we have become desensitized to it. But to us it’s more than a marketing gimmick. It’s how we try to live and it’s how we want our company to thrive.
As kids, everyone wants to change the world. Over time we saw and understood the different ways we could make a difference. We could work for a charity, as teachers, we could become politicians.
As we worked in various different unsatisfying jobs we realised the capacity companies have to change the world. We realised that they don’t have to play politics or beg for money. They have the power to change the world a little bit straight away. Just by helping to make sure team members are happy and fulfilled they can immediately improve lives. By improving one person’s life you improve the lives of everyone around them. Happiness spreads, and a person’s place of work has a huge impact on how happy they are.
We started to realise that businesses aren’t these evil profit machines, they are communities of individuals. These communities have an amazing power to do good. It’s just a case of giving them direction.
They can do good in themselves too, by creating new things or helping people enjoy their lives more. As neither of us are clever enough to invent a cure for cancer, and both of us are customer service obsessed we decided we wanted to give people happy experiences. We wanted to give people bluebird days!
I have always been passionate about the environment, I drive my family mad by following them around turning things off. But it seems pointless when every computer and every light is left on in so many offices around the world every night. And that’s before you even start thinking about all the other places for savings.
So we knew what we wanted to do, just not how to do it. We knew that we needed a vehicle through which to make people happy (customers and team members) and to generally improve the world. In lots of ways the vehicle itself was the least important thing. By a company taking small decisions to think about these impacts, they can have a far bigger effect than any individuals could on themselves. Just think how much of a difference all those lights turning off would be!
Hopefully if you are reading this, you know that we developed an idea of ‘tea mixology’, we decided to take a staple product and have fun with it. Take it from something comforting and make it something fun in itself. Make people happy with it!
So we get to what we are creating now, a company where everything is focussed on making sure our customers are happy. We don’t have a team yet, but if we are lucky enough to grow we want them to be happy. We care about the world and we think about it when we make decisions.
We know that when you buy one of our iced teas (if you have been lucky enough to track us down in person!), your cup won’t end up in a bush forever or filling a landfill because they are all biodegradable. At the moment that might not be saving a huge amount when compared to some of the big players, but over time it will make a massive difference.
How much of a difference would it make if Starbucks took the same decision?
People are surprised when we say that we run a business. In a lot of ways we’re the opposite of what you expect. We didn’t make our first millions in the school playground. People even call us hippies because we love to go to new places, and meet new people. Every year we work at Glastonbury as members of CND with all the other hippies!
My Bluebird day!
Not quite the image of ‘business people’ you sometimes get from the newspapers, but actually the more ‘business people’ we meet the less I think we’re unusual! Hopefully it’s something that will work and let us leave the world a little better than we found it. Isn’t that everyone’s real goal?
Happy New Year Teabirds.
I hope that you celebrated the coming of 2013 in style and that you are successfully applying yourselves to your new year resolutions!
I saw in the new year with 9 of my closest friends on a narrow boat on the Oxford Canal. I had one of my weird and wonderful hunches it was going to be a brilliant plan and luckily it was!
There was enough rum to sink us, a box of sticky mustaches and a couple of pirate hats, which led to an incredibly entertaining trip once you factored in spoons around a table meant for 4, tag teaming 13 locks in the pouring rain and a man overboard!
It was great to finally have some time off and be forced to slow down (literally- there is only so fast you can go on a boat with a max speed of 4mph and crammed with 10 people) and the remote places we moored (to avoid upsetting the neighbors with Gangham style dance moves on the roof at 2am) didn’t have any phone signal – bliss!
It gave me a chance to reflect upon our journey so far and look at the things I wanted to aim for in 2013. My new years resolutions this year seemed to have a lot more depending on them that the usual ‘stop eating 3 kit kat chunky’s a day’.
One of my Bluebird resolutions was to make more of our social media.
We all use social media an obscene amount and it is changing the way that humans interact, grow and learn. I find it incredible that Facebook alone has 1 billion active users – that’s 1 in 7 people and Lady Gaga has over 33 million followers on Twitter!*
It can also be a very useful and successful business tool if you have the time/inclination/effort to use it – as many ‘social media optimization’ companies have cashed in on. You can get applications that you can use to ‘schedule’ your tweets or posts for the whole year if you want. You can even buy followers.
I think you all already know my views on paying companies for these sorts of common sense things so I don’t need to get out my soap box.
Let’s look at it simply.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram + WordPress are an essential and effective channel to interact with anyone, anywhere. Friends, strangers, current customers, potential customers, others in your industry or in small businesses or just people using the platforms who may not be or never wish to be your customer!
As Mike is constantly reminding me, sales conversion is (quite crudely put) the end goal to pretty much everything you do in an online business.
However, I don’t approach Bluebird’s social media strategy with this in mind at all- mainly because it isn’t how I view the world or my life (it would be a very sad place to live in my opinion if I did) and also, and perhaps more importantly, because it simply doesn’t work that way.
Social media is all about interaction. People use it to learn new things, forge new friendships, speak to people, share their views, laugh, share, contribute. It makes perfect sense to me that people want to share what they love or laugh at with others.. it’s human nature. And social media allows this sharing to be both instant and extremely far reaching.
The thought that your words or views or pictures can be shared instantly with millions of strangers all over the world is enchanting and addicting.
So what you want to gain from your social media platforms is shares. Likes. Pins. Favourites Follows. Conversations.
You want to get people talking about you.
And you want to hear from, talk to and share the people who you like to interact with. Personally, I like brands like Innocent whose posts make me laugh. So what do I do? I share with my friends.
(Also just spent at least 30 minutes procrastinating playing with all of Innocents ‘Beat January games and posts… Buns of Steel is my current fav!)
Why on earth anyone would waste hundreds (if not thousands) of pounds paying newspapers/billboards/tv to spread their brand in print is beyond me when you can get thousands of regular, happy, social media loving, humans to do the job for free.
And the best bit… you enjoy it and they enjoy it too. It’s happiness spreading.
Granted there may be hundreds of people who read our posts who have absolutely no interest in tea, perhaps would never buy anything from us, but just thought our post was funny.
You could argue that it is a waste of time.
Well is it? I don’t think adding happiness to peoples lives even in the smallest degree can ever be a waste of my time, on a personal level. And on a business level it sets you out above the crowd as a business who is likable, honest, fun and friendly.
So with this in mind lets look at 5 simple things you can do to make more of social media for your business:
1. Join platforms that you are genuinely interested in and that you enjoy.
It isn’t supposed to be a chore or inflexible. If you like photos and pictures join Pinterest or Instagram, if you like keeping it short and sweet with strangers join Twitter etc. You can then set it up so that whatever you share on Instagram (or whichever) automatically feeds onto your Facebook page etc.
2. Get involved in a two way interaction!
The BIG one. Don’t just join, follow noone and bombard people with your pictures, comments, or even worse sales pitches and expect people to share or be interested.. because they wont.
3. If you are struggling to understand or use the platform either find a savvy person and offer tea/cake/hugs in exchange for help or YouTube/Google it!
So far I have not found a problem or puzzle that either You Tube or Google haven’t been able to answer/fix.
4. Be interesting! (And funny if you can stretch that far!)
Think about what you would like to hear about or what makes you laugh. Think about what types of things would make you take the time to share with your friends/followers. And do it.
5. Think about setting up a weekly plan of interactions along side your ad hoc posts.
Set yourself the goal of doing something regularly so that people expect it and look forward to it. Perhaps a competition every Friday or even as simple as sharing some things you found interesting that week.
As part of my new years resolutions I have set out a weekly plan of interactions for Bluebird:
Happy Mondays: Obviously the day that gets the most grief for being ‘the worst day of the week’. So we will find something funny or cool that will make you smile every Monday to set you up for the week.
Teabird Tweet Up Tuesdays: We will tweet or share our favourite comments from the week. Tea related or not.
FBT (Freebe Tea) Friday: Free stuff on a Friday.. honestly can’t think of a better way to end the week than with a free cup of tea!
The Nest’s Big Thing: We will share our Big Thing of the week, be it a some new music, a place, an independent retailer we’ve met or just our favourite pair of socks.
It may seem simple, and it is. And it might seem a bit daft, which it is. You might also ask ‘what on earth has some of that got to do with tea?’ and the answer would be: not a lot.
But the next time someone talks to them about tea they might mention us. They might just be saying ‘ I don’t like tea or know anything about it but someone shared a funny joke by this tea company with me last week and they seem really cool, maybe check them out.’ The important thing is they will be starting a conversation about us. And conversations can sometimes go viral.
We are all humans and we like to laugh and be happy and most of all we like to share these things with other humans. It’s basic human nature. It’s basic business sense.
Love + Tea
ThatBluebirdGirl
xXx
*Facebook stats taken from: http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts
Twitter stats taken from: http://twittercounter.com/pages/100
Do you want the good news first or the terrible news?
I’ll give you the worst of it first… The inevitable has happened. My trusty brick laptop has finally failed me. It has been in a terrible state for quite some time – lots of gaffa tape and some bodged wiring have got me this far, but alas, it seems last week (also possibly the busiest week for Bluebird yet) was its time to go.
So I am having to make do until the new year as all of our pennies are tied up in ridiculous amounts of Christmas Cake tea – which has been selling so well we’ve had to get in lots more this week to try and keep up with the demand. That’s the first bit of good news.
Second is that we have (so far) survived two long, bitterly cold, weekends dressed as Victorians at Gloucester and Worcester Christmas markets. The police and the weather man tried their best to ruin our chances – putting out severe flood warnings BUT people still came out and apart from the frost bite, successful weekends were had all round.
Like the costume?
So the big news is that in November I was presented the opportunity to utilise some space at the Gallery at Bartons – which also hosts a monthly comedy night, among other things, that is well worth a visit.
Every month we attend ‘Not The Camden Market’ at Bartons. There is something about the old Bartons plot that inspires creativity and attracts such an incredible array of visitors. I am always impressed and humbled by the incredible turn out.The old Barton site has a magical charm that attracts people to see what its up to next.
After taking part in various pop ups over the summer I thought it would be excellent for Nottingham to have a similar project to showcase all the local talent that I’d seen in my home town.So over Christmas we opened the doors to Nottingham’s first Pop Up Boutique hosted by Bartons Plc and organised by us.
With the future of the high street so uncertain I think the pop up concept is a brilliant way of helping small businesses find a platform to share what they do in an affordable way. Not only does it make sense for smaller start ups and independents to have their stock out on display for sale rather than sitting in their back room but it can also be a brilliant chance to learn more about how your business works in different environments and how different people responded to your products.
I have lost count of the number of courageous people I have met this year who say they were made redundant or couldn’t find a job so they decided to set up their own businesses. A pop up makes the most of a difficult situation and helps those who have been brave enough to face their own, and the countries problems head on.
Mike wasn’t too sure about it in the beginning because we were already so busy over Christmas but I championed the project (and nagged. A lot.) until I got my way… and by promising that he wouldn’t have to do anything and that he wouldn’t even notice the extra work(!)
The idea was to provide a stress free, all in one shopping destination packed full of unique gifts from a variety of independent businesses, mostly local start ups too. I wanted there to be a real variety of top quality, not on the high street gifts so I was sifting through applications to settle on 15 of the best local and independent designers, makers and small businesses with all sorts of unique, mostly hand crafted gifts.
I’m proud to say we had a little bit of everything- from real ale to spices, paintings to bears, tea to little lion fancy dress costumes, Jewellery, Natural cosmetics, Children’s clothes, Vintage clothes, Knit wear… the list goes on.
We also set up a Bluebird Tea Bar so people can grab a cup of Gingerbread Chai Tea Latte while they shop!
The Pop Up Boutique launched the first Wednesday of December with a late night shopping party. The local Magpie Brewery had their real ales on tap and Bluebird did their hot winter tea cocktails! (Rudolph’s Red Nose, made with Christmas Cake tea, Amaretto and Sloe Gin, was a BIG hit!) There was also live music from local musician and Mesters (Nottingham’s vinyl recording studio) owner, Laurence Kirk.
It has been a bit nerve racking being on the other side, being an event organiser. I’m more than happy to take risks on gut feelings with my own company, it’s a bit different asking other people to take a chance and let me do that with their businesses.
My organisation skills are good (I think!) and I’m not afraid of hard work but something the organisers of the Gloucester Victorian market said to me, after the 60mph wind blew over a row of market stalls, stuck in my mind this week – He said that you never really get any gratification because when things go well traders think ‘Oh my products are so good they sell themselves!’ (which is true because we do it!) and when things go badly they think ‘My products aren’t the problem it must be the organisers who haven’t done their job properly’ (again we are also guilty of this!)
All in all it has been a successful project and I am sad to say goodbye to it. It has enforced my desire to continue working on interesting projects and collaborating with others as well as reminding me how much I love being in a customer facing role, making people smile and meeting new faces.
Hopefully it wont be too long before I will be able to do that with a Bluebird space of some kind!
Love + Tea
ThatBluebirdGirl
xXx
I met Helen, The Foodie Gift Hunter, over the summer at an event and she has become a fan of our Toasted Apple tea!
I cannot remember if I had this conversation with Helen but we get asked an awful lot if we have heard of ‘this little company I love to get my tea from called Teapigs?’
I first heard of Teapigs while at university, long before Bluebird, as it was stocked in our local independent cafe, Leonard’s – the breakfast destination of choice after the early morning sessions on the river!
It had some really cool packaging and colours and I presumed it must be a cute independent brand. I have also met many others who believe the same and some independent deli and cafe owners who have even said to me ‘oh I’ve met Louise who set up Teapigs and shes very nice’.
I’m sure she is. And I must admit I am a big fan of their peppermint licorice blend. And obviously I love tea and any tea companies who share my passion for a good old cuppa have my respect.
However, what I don’t respect is companies that are not transparent and unfortunately Teapigs fall under this category.
Helen makes some very good points in her blog post and it is well worth a read!
ThatBluebirdGirl 
