We used our culinary/business backgrounds to create a company that retails/manufactures/wholesales tea. Here's our experience so far.

Following the survey format:

1) What is your product or service? Give us your elevator pitch.

We’re Sol and Pablo, founders of Raizana Tea Co. We’re a family (wife+husband) company that hand-crafts tea and wellness blends. We love what we do: we believe in simplicity, integrity, and healthy living. Our Tagline is "Sip To A New You" we create non-traditional tea blends with a healthy purpose; be healthier while treating yourself to something you really enjoy.

2) What motivated you to start a business?

After we had our daughter Sol suffered from insomnia. She was too sensitive to prescription and OTC sleep-aids so her mom reminded her of some herbal remedies used in Mexico and suggested she take some valerian (Sol is from Villahermosa and Pablo is from Mexicali, Mexico btw). The problem is that valerian smells like old gym socks. So Sol used her culinary background to blend the valerian root with other herbs/flavors to make it more palatable.

Her night-owl friends (retirees and other apartment complex neighbors who also suffered from insomnia) noticed she hadn't been hanging out at night with them and asked where she had been. Sol told them about her tea and they also started trying it. Pretty soon she became the "sleppy tea dealer" and they encouraged her to make more of it.

3) How long have you been working on your startup?

We set up the LLC in 2009, trying out recipes through customer feedback at farmers markets/swapmeets/anywhere we could get an audience.

We started selling through our website and Amazon.com and the FBA Amazon around 2011, and this really increased the online sales traffic. But we really started working on the wholesale side of things when we signed up as exhibitors at a regional (Central CA) Food Expo. This forced us to look at our products in terms of wider commercial appeal, calculate COGS, margins, wholesale pricing, etc.

In 2013, we decided to sign a lease for a manufacturing space (until then we subleased commercial kitchens to batch produce). We found an affordable inspection-ready food facility at a historic theater in downtown Fresno . Our goal was just to sell online but soon after we built a tea bar after people came by asking if they could buy a cup of brewed tea.

4) What is your 6-month plan? Your 1-year plan? Your 5-year plan?

Online: We have plans to start listing our products on Amazon Japan, Europe, Canada and see how they do. We currently sell on Fancy.com, Amazon.com, and sold through redditgifts before they ended the program.

Brick & Mortar: The first tea bar was a bit of an afterthought. Last month our neighboring tenant moved out and we were offered the retail space. So we jumped on the opportunity and we're expanding and building a dedicated retail tea shop. We plan to open in June.

Wholesale: We shipped our first order to the local Whole Foods store, so we hope to cultivate that account and be able to expand regionally.

Export: We currently private label one of our teas for a Japanese customer. We have been attending food trade shows and meeting with international buyers and we are currently researching how to export to Mexico City Superama and Canadian independent grocers.

5) What have been your most memorable positive and negative experiences.

Positive: We try to strike a work/life balance. We've decided to do this while we enjoy it. Its A LOT of work, and some of the daily questions/problems to resolve can be at times overwhelming. But we are also LEARNING SO MUCH. Way more than at undergraduate/masters business school. We meet people that genuinely want to share their business tips and experience. And at the end of each week we feel that satisfying sense of accomplishment. We still love what we do and it's not that we're making huge money, but We actually like interacting with our customers, and learning.

Negative: The first IRS letter we got with a ~$2,000 fine for not filing our fisrt LLC returns on time. Our hearts just sank to our stomachs. That was SO MUCH MONEY. We tried to resolve it by writing a letter to IRS explaining that we were new to the business and lost track of the filing requirements. It was a long shot but amazingly IT WORKED! They wrote back saying that the fees were waived and to keep track of filings in the future. We have kept track of filings since.

6) If you could travel back in time, what advice would you give yourself?

Keeping track of Product, People, Procedures are the most important factors.

Product: Know your numbers/costs/prices of products. Seek many suppliers, backup suppers. We focus on high-quality but want to be able to have a margin, or be able to quote

People: Focus on having the right team, meeting the right people, finding the right customers.

procedures: have a system early on to keep track of tax filings, lots when manufacturing, receipts for accounting, emails for customer service follow-up ...

Thank you and apologies for the long read. Hope to have sparked some curiosity and motivation to embark on your own entrepreneurship goals. Feel free to ask on any topics and we'll try to elaborate.