@Ctran, this is a most admirable ambition. It is not an easy one to achieve though. I have been buying from smaller producers since the beginning of my tea career and there are many aspects that need great efforts in, unless you do not mind bad quality hurting your name, or losing money to various bad practices by the very people whom you want to support.
@Chawang you are definitely hitting the core of the issue: differences in the people.
Most often people easily collectively think of smaller farmers are one kind of suppliers. They are not. They are as varied as personalities, i.e. there are honest, skilled, and good practice people of various backgrounds and limitations, there are also opportunists, shady people some of whom can pretend very well to be, say, high quality traditional tea producers. Whichever group one may belong to, he can be successful, mediocre or a complete failure. Not any different from any other trade in your part of the world, or mine.
In order to contribute to the promotion of small, independent farms, there are a few things that I do and, so far, they have worked for my business:
- Find real quality, consistent producers
- Find at least two for each type of tea you’ll carry
- Establish a personal relationship with them, ie, do care for them as individuals. It is love to other people that you do such business afterall, right?
- Understand that they have great limitations as normal suppliers, and which are they in terms of possibilities of limitation and hinderance of your own business operations
- Devise ways that you can do to compensate for these limitations. If such devise is not possible with any particular one potential, don’t commence working with him yet.
- Understand the quality and market price of similar products available through larger producers. Weight the difference in the small farm and quality marketing pretext
These are the parts concerning the supply side. Operation, marketing, management, and business strategies are other things you’ll have to be good at in trying to gain a foothold in the competitive tea trade.
And then there is the basic necessity of knowing your products. This not only for selling, but in day one when you approach potential suppliers. They are human afterall — they have all the weaknesses of any human and can easily fall for temptations of cheating, despise, and most often, lost of faith.
