Of Yarn and Tea

Yarns of different quality all look similar. These low price ones for practice appear the same as the high quality ones.

Yesterday my wife had a hunch for learning crochet so we went to a local yarn shop to get something to start practicing. On the second floor of a tiny post-war cement building, the eight hundred square feet space was stacked from floor to ceiling with balls of yarns. Pieces of handmade yarn garment items of all sorts hang from the ceiling. We were simply overwhelmed.

The shop owner kindly recommended us some lower price products. Less than 2 dollars a ball as shown in the photo and they are not even the cheapest ones in the perimetrical tray. Some of the nicer ones that we can touch were over 20 a ball. Others are behind glass.

To an untrained eye like mine they all look quite similar. To the touch, however, the nicer ones really feel different. Looking closer, the colours are so much more pleasing too even when in the same chrome and hue.

It dawned on me that this is so similar in tea. There are so many products out there that look so similarly yet innately different. They could be marked half the price or the same as the genuine stuff and yet less than one-tenth the value.

In the world of the internet, deception with what appears on the browsing screen is commonplace. How do I work like that yarn shop owner to show consumers the difference?