Starter Kit. Idea 61 of 500. Cluster 3
Premium tea packaging and gift tins, sold anywhere, not only in Kandy
The mechanism, from the book
The Zermatt water bottle. Sigiriya has not got a stone with its own name on it.
The first step
Design one gift tin for a tea you like, with the estate's region on the label, and pack 30. Offer them on sale or return to shops outside the tea country: a Colombo café, a beach hotel shop, a guesthouse near the airport. Sales far from Kandy are exactly the proof this idea needs.
- Who pays first
- Beach hotels and city cafés whose guests want a good tea gift and never reached the hill country to buy one.
- What leaves today
- Tea leaves in bulk and the gift trade sits in the hills; well-packed tins sold everywhere capture the gift margin on the island.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tea Board. Ask what registration packing and selling tea in tins needs.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask what standard tins and labels that hold food should meet.
Check before you spend
That packing tea for sale is registered, that tins are safe for food, and that labels state origin and grade honestly.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a visitor pay for a premium tea tin?
- What does one printed tin cost in a first order?
- Which shops outside Kandy would stock it?
A comparison from the book
Ceylon tea. Chapter Four
"does its own blending and branding and packing says it gets more than 3 times the national average export price"
Packing your own tea is where the price rises, as the book's example shows.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.