Tea infuser startup Teforia shuts down
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Oh, please.
A product specifically made for dummies with too much money is the Carver Silver Seven amplifier.[1] Bob Carver, who was a very good amplifier designer, offered a challenge in 1987. He would build a low-cost amplifier to exactly match the transfer function of some High End amplifier. The outputs matched; this was tested by running both amplifiers in parallel, hooked up to cancel out. It worked. In blind listening tests, nobody could reliably tell the difference. High End reviewers hated this.
So, partly as a joke. Carver designed the Carver Silver Seven. "Each hand-rubbed, black lacquered chassis rests on four rubbery Simms Vibration Dampers, which in turn rest on polished granite anti-vibration bases." Each amplifier has 19 tubes. Per channel. The power supply is on a separate chassis. Each chassis is almost half a meter deep. There's a four minute delay on power up for careful tube warming.
Audiophiles bought it.
Carver's successors then came out with the Silver Seven 700. This has twenty tubes, weighs 100 pounds, and costs $35,000. Per channel. Presumably someone is buying that.
[1] https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuu... [2] http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700
Something similar happened with wine too.
There was some smart researcher(Brochet), who took white white, added red food coloring to it, and did a blind test between that and red wine, for wine "science" students. They couldn't reliably tell the difference.
And than he went and created his own expensive wine brand, successfully.
And i was just kidding about signalling being a right. I think it's far better to avoid the status race, as much as possible. for example, in Amish communities, there's relatively little of that, and they are, according to survey, "as happy as billionaires".
It’s priced for very high income tea enthusiasts, with features that strike against everything a normal tea enthusiast enjoys.
For $100 and cheap packets this would fly, targeting people who currently don’t care about that (tea bag users.) But then, the margins would be shit and you’re trying to compete against an already simple and cheap tech.
What demographic were they hallucinating?
Few days ago I saw a Kickstarter for a water purifier with subscription cartridges[0], and my first thought was: "Oh boy, that's going to be another Juicero". Honestly tough it's very hard to predict, and it could go either way and be a Nespresso/Keurig and not a Juicero/Teforia.
[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mitte-water/mitte-creat...
The tea enthusiast community is as much about tea accessories - infusers, cups, mugs, kettles, pots, sharing pitchers, tea pets, gongfu tray, etc. - as it is about the tea itself. For the sort of folks who are happy to drop dollars on tea goods, a machine built around excluding 90% of the fun actively goes against the grain. In addition, for $1000 you can buy several of the really, really nice tea pots that make most tea enthusiasts drool.
Please, don't take my word for it. Check out any popular tea blog. Or the agenda for any industry conference.
The way I see it, tea drinkers are likely to fall into a matrix of degree of tea enthusiasm, degree of tea accessory enthusiasm, and price insensitivity - let's call it a 3x3x3. 0 indicates some small degree of enjoyment or price insensitivity.
Most tea drinkers by numbers are going to be found in Tea[0]Accessory[0]Price[0] - folks who drop a lipton bag in their daily cup. They aren't likely to shift from their 1-cent tastes-like-tuchus tea to a $1000 machine with several-dollars-per-serving tea. If they cared that much they'd either not drink lipton, or if they were that price insensitive they'd at least buy better tea bags.
The second largest group is Tea[1]Accessories[0]Price[0]. These folks shell out for nicer tea bags, with tea comprised of tiny remnants of leaves rather than out-and-out fannings. They like tea; they think of themselves as tea drinkers. They may have a favored tea pot. They may know what whole leaf tea is and buy it on occasion. Their tea still only costs about 20 cents per cup (something like Vahdam) down to 6 cents a cup (PG Tips, the tea that every English hospital sends you home with after giving birth. And... it's surprisingly pleasant.) There is, again, a pretty steep difference between "I throw a better tea bag into my coffee cup for 6 cents rather than a shit bag for 1 cent" and "I will shell out a thousand bucks for a machine that will let me pay starbucks prices for a cup of tea."
So, addressable market is pretty tiny. Let's jump over to Price[2]. It exists. For tea enthusiasts most will be found in something like Tea[2]Accessories[2]Price[1]. Tea, it should be noted, is a cheap pass time. Even very fine tea is not generally expensive. Even very fine tea pots will not generally break $200. For these folks, there is pleasure in discovering new tea, buying new teaware, pairing teaware to tea (e.g., the right heat-conserving properties of pot to the leaf), and so on. Commoditizing their tea actively deprives them of pleasure. Removing tea-making accessories from the process deprives them of pleasure. It's like trying to sell k-cups to that guy who makes a big deal about this new single-farm roast from Nicaragua that he found for his pour-over, that he likes to make on his artisanal aeropress rig he backed on kickstarter. And where do they fall on price? I'm pretty price-insensitive on tea; I regularly buy the good stuff. On the higher end (let's not talk about seriously aged pu'erh), for instance, I got this spring's Ai Jiao Rock Oolong Tea of Wu Yi Shan, which ran 9 bucks USD for 50g. That's good for about 18 8-ounce cups - or lets be fair, about two weeks of my big morning cup (though that nice oolong is hardly a daily drinker). That puts me at 64 cents per cup. My daily drinker is an earl grey supreme w/ silver tips from Harney & Sons, which runs 25 cents for my big morning cup.
So which market segment are they looking for? To care about tea, but not enough to care about commoditized tea servings. To not care about accessories. And to not care about a hundred-fold price increase up front and a ten-to-hundred-fold increase per cup. So... tea[1]accessories[0]price[2+]?
I can't say it doesn't exist, but as addressable markets go, there's no reason to believe it's anything but vanishingly tiny. Which, really, anyone in the tea enthusiast community could have shared with them right up front.
That's not to say there aren't things that are in-demand in the tea community. They're just not the sort of things VCs would throw money at.
I am neither a coffee nor a tea enthusiast and also not an expert on the respective markets, so please excuse any naive assumptions/equations I might be making.
At least in Germany, with a strong middle-class, you do have a substantial coffee[1]accessories[0]price[2] market, with the persona of that market buying a Jura or Saeco full automatic machine (600-2000€) and coffee beans from Tchibo. They value their coffee because they drink a lot of it, but they also don't feel like going the extra mile to prepare it. For them, the coffee machine is also a status symbol they can show off when people come over. They - unlike the coffee enthusiasts with a manual espresso maker and an X step brewing and roasting process - don't really care about the fact that all the fun has been automated away.
I trust you when you say that there currently nothing happening in the tea[1]accessories[0]price[2] market segment. However, I think it might be possible that it might just be untaped due to lack of machines like the Teforia, or that the market could be created via marketing (by also cutting into the coffee market).
There are people like you describe in coffee to, but they are outnumbered by those, who just want some caffeine.
And I think the tea startup should think how to expand the niche, not try to cater to current enthusiast. Of course, this machine was very wrong for this aim.
Only if strapped to winged pigs, I'm afraid.
The flip side is of course brewing with real quality leaves, but it's more expensive and is more effort. They both have their places, unlike this machine.
Here’s how I manage to control all those variables without a thousand dollar tea keurig: 1) one time, just once, I measure the volume of my tea cup. This is good for, you know, the life of the cup. 2) I throw an infuser on a scale, and throw teaspoons of tea in until I’ve hit the the right grams/100 ml. I now know how many tap of loose leaf are right for that cup.
3) I enjoy black tea, so boiling is fine. If it’s a day I’m feeling like a green or an oolong, I’ll dump a food thermometer probe into my kettle - it’ll beep at my desired temp.
4) I pour the water in the cup, stick in the infuser, and throw 5 minutes on the timer that comes with every iPhone.
Just so we are clear, the everyday cup of tea looks like this: throw 2 tsp leaves into infuser, boil water, rinse leaves, stick infuser in cup, let sit five minutes.
Oddly, with all the magic of “a timer on my phone,” my daily cup is controlled for temp, pressure (I’m not changing altitudes here), steep time, and water volume. And All it cost was an 8$ infuser.
But, sure, buy up all the 1000$ kettles you can grab.
www.special-t.com
You didn’t actually say anything new - you just sound like you work for Teforia.
Unfortunately, tea market seems to be too small to pay for such a convenience. There are some capsule-machines like Nespresso that can brew tea, but they make too small portions.
So you hit a button, water drops into your cup at the correct temperature, and all you have to do is drop in your tea bag / infuser of choice. Considering tea needs to steep, it's about as close as tea is going to come to espresso.
The first problem is you should stay near them while they are pouring the water, and it takes time, especially if I'm making a tea for two. The second is that making hot water is not the most time-expensive for me, it's mixing teas and additives and putting them into a tea bag. Unfortunately, pre-bagged teas are usually low quality.
The loss on the human side (jobs, etc) is sad, but I certainly don't shed a tear when this stuff doesn't succeed.
The Juicero was essentially an expensive pair of hands. The only thing the Teforia MAYBE offers, if I'm incredibly generous about it, is the pressurized steeping, but there is no way that it makes enough of a taste difference to be worth it over traditional western or gongfu brewing. I'm also not convinced that it's actually better, and anecdotal experiences from Teforia buyers don't really help because when you pay $1000 for your tea infuser, of course you're going to "think" it's better. I bet blind taste tests would come out quite differently.
Let's even say the result does actually taste better, even under blind testing. There is no way it tastes hundreds of dollars better. Why would someone spend that much on a slight taste improvement? It only makes sense for people with incredibly high budgets/income. Tea enthusiasts already control all the variables (temperature, time, etc) and can and do make great tea using gaiwans and teapots. The Teaforia solves a non-existent problem.
As other commenters say clearly what the breast pump startups need is a blockchain.
Even does this thing where it dips the tea in and out ask it brews / infuses / whatever tea lingo is
$1000 to make tea and I have to buy the tea from the company? No way Jose.
You say "overly babysitting", but which part of pushing the "170F" button on the $50 temperature controlled electric kettle with easy single-press presets and then twisting an egg timer is so hard that it needs another $950 and then special multi-dollar packets and, omfg, internet access to a cloud service? I agree with the other commenter. It definitely sounds like you work for Teforia. Also like you aren't thinking honestly about how easy it is to make tea.
I don't know maybe you're just terrible at making tea the usual way but it doesn't have to be that way.
One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping.
With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.
Not to say tea is hard to make but if you want that extra bit of flavor, the pressure driven microbrew really makes a difference.