Selling your tea under your own name when buyers know you only through the broker

A packer who has bought your second flush at auction for years may never have heard your estate's name. The packer knows a mark in a catalogue, a grade and an invoice number. To sell directly, make that mark findable under your own name. Spell the estate and the mark one way everywhere. Give each grade and flush a page. Let a stranger request a sample from a named person who answers. The broker stays one route to market, and stops being the only one.

Why a buyer who likes your tea cannot find you

At auction a buyer meets your tea as a sample in a tasting room, a line in a catalogue and a mark on the chest. The mark is not always the estate's legal name. The company that owns the garden may trade under a third. A café owner in Bengaluru tastes your orthodox at a friend's shop and searches the mark. Nothing comes up, or an estate with a similar name in another district does, and the order goes there.

This post is about the buyers the broker does not reach, in Assam and beyond.

Who to sell to directly, and who to leave to the auction

Direct selling works with buyers who want to know where the tea came from and will pay for it. Think of specialty tea shops and cafés in the metros, hotels, and small importers who take a few chests. Add corporate gifting, private-label brands too small to bid at auction, and consumers buying packed tea online. Large packers buying CTC on price are better left to the auction. Your broker serves them well.

How much an estate may sell outside the auction, and on what paperwork, depends on Tea Board rules that change from time to time. Selling packed tea to consumers under your own name also brings food licensing and labelling rules into play. Check both with your adviser or the regulator before you take the first direct order.

The findability checklist

Work through it in order. The first four need little beyond time.

• One name, spelt one way. The estate name with the mark beside it. Identical on the website, the Google Business Profile, any B2B listing, the invoice and the sample pouch.
• A page for each grade and flush you make. Your grades, whether CTC (such as BP or PF) or orthodox (such as FOP, TGFOP or BOP). First flush, second flush, rains tea, autumnal. Give the liquor colour, the cup in plain words, the leaf size and what it suits: strong milk tea, a pot drunk black, a blend.
• Your own photographs. Sections, withering troughs and the rolling room, taken in season.
• Trade terms on one page. The minimum direct order and how it is packed: chests, paper sacks or foil packs. Where it is dispatched from, and how samples are sent.
• A sample request a stranger can finish. A form or a WhatsApp number, with the name of the person who replies and what happens next.
• One plain line on how you sell: "Most of our tea is sold at auction. We also sell directly to cafés, retailers and importers." It tells the buyer where you stand, and tells your broker you are not hiding anything. Check the wording against your broker agreement first.
• A map pin at the factory gate. Your Google Business Profile, placed so a buyer visiting Dibrugarh can find the road in.

Talk to direct buyers before the flush, not after

The auction sells what you made last week. A direct buyer wants to plan. A café that liked your second flush wants to hear in March that it is coming, with a sample date. Once the best invoices have gone to auction, there is nothing left to offer. Write to your direct list before each flush with what you expect to make and when samples will go out. Then send the samples the day the tea is sorted and packed, while the buyer still remembers asking.

For example: an orthodox estate near Dibrugarh

This is an invented example. An estate near Dibrugarh makes good orthodox teas and sells all of them through a Guwahati broker. The owner's family builds a consumer website under a new brand name, with a shopping cart and 100-gram tins. The brand has nothing to do with the mark. A tea shop owner in Pune tastes the estate's second flush at a friend's and searches for the mark, finds nothing, and buys from a Darjeeling garden that answered on the first day. In this first version the tins sell a few a month and courier costs eat most of the margin.

The second version keeps the tins but moves them down the page, because the first version put consumers ahead of the buyers who were already asking. The site is renamed around the estate and the mark. A trade page offers chests and paper sacks to cafés and retailers, with a sample request and a named person. Before the next second flush the estate writes to the dozen buyers who have asked about it, with a sample date. Three of them take a few chests, a small share of the crop, and the rest still goes through the broker. The wider rebuild took the family two months of evenings, and the broker was told who the estate sells to directly and who it leaves to the auction.

When the broker should stay your only route

If you make large volumes of CTC sold on price, the auction is the efficient route. A few kilos sold online will not move your accounts. If nobody can answer a sample request in the plucking season, a website that invites requests is worse than none. And if your teas vary widely from flush to flush, say so. A direct buyer who expects the same cup every month will be disappointed by a seasonal garden tea, so say which flush to expect and when.

Search your own mark first

Search your own mark and estate name on Google and on two B2B marketplaces, the way a stranger would, and note what comes up. Then write down which buyers asked your broker or your manager about buying direct last season. If the search finds nothing and the list has names on it, the work is worth doing. Deciding whether direct sales deserve a place beside the broker is a route to market question, and the sales hub shows how it fits the rest of selling. If your mark should be findable before the next flush, tell us what you need.