Winter is to tea shops what summer is to beach hotels. This season represents the peak time for tea, with consumption rising significantly.
As a tea shop owner, you need to start preparing months in advance. Adjusting your stock and sales strategies is crucial to capture your customers’ attention and meet their needs.
This guide covers all the key aspects of winter teas and will help inspire you to make this season memorable.
Types of Winter Teas and Flavours
Winter is a season that changes habits and tastes, influencing consumer preferences.
While lighter teas like green or white tea with floral and fruity flavours are popular in warmer seasons, winter calls for more robust teas such as black or Pu Erh, along with sweeter or spicier flavours.
Here are the most popular winter teas:
- Full-bodied black teas like Keemun, Ceylon, or Golden Yunnan.
- Black teas for milk, such as Assam, or blends like English Breakfast, Chai, or Pakistani.
- Spiced blends with cinnamon, ginger, clove, cocoa, or even chilli, perfect for warming up.
- Fruit blends with apple and orange.
- Sweet blends with chocolate, caramel, cream, or baked apple.
Herbal Teas Play a Key Role
It’s not just tea that takes centre stage in winter. Herbal infusions are more popular than ever.
The main reason is that being mostly caffeine-free, they allow for higher daily consumption. Additionally, thanks to the natural properties of their ingredients, they help maintain good health during the season when colds are very common.
Herbal blends such as mint, liquorice, thyme, rosemary, and chamomile are top sellers.
Rooibos blends the caffeine-free South African shrub with a naturally sweet flavour is also very popular.
Adapting Your Winter Tea and Herbal Infusion Stock
Once you know which teas and herbal infusions are in high demand for the winter season, the next step is to review and adjust your inventory.
Timing is crucial for success. We recommend starting this process at the end of summer. In warmer countries like Spain or Italy, you can begin in early autumn.
Create a list of all the products you offer and, considering the characteristics mentioned earlier, rate their winter compatibility from 1 to 10. For this evaluation, exclude the recipes that are timeless bestsellers in your business.
After the evaluation, replace any items scoring less than a 5 with new, more winter-appropriate options.
Marketing Strategies to Boost Winter Tea Sales
Now that you’ve adapted your selection with the top winter teas, it’s time to get your customers to discover and buy them repeatedly.
Promote Your Teas
In your store, these teas should grab attention. If you have a physical store, use distinctive elements like snowflake magnets on seasonal tea tins.
For online stores, add a banner to product photos with a steaming cup, for example. You can also create a winter tea section for all teas rated between 8 and 10.
Highlight new recipes with maximum visibility in your physical store or on your online store’s homepage.
Offer Tastings
Nothing works better in a tea shop than letting customers sample the product. Brew a different winter tea each day and offer a small sample to customers.
You can also include free samples with every order. These don’t have to be large, just enough for one or two cups at home. This can also be a great strategy to drive sales: “Get a selection of winter tea samples with purchases over $30,” for example.
Winter Tea Tastings and Workshops
Another way to boost sales and gain customers is by hosting tea workshops. It’s a great way to introduce your products while educating your customers about tea culture.
Themes can vary from winter tea recipes to pairings with winter desserts, or even tea and book workshops.
Create a Tasting Pack
A tasting pack is another way to showcase your seasonal novelties. This involves including a selection of winter teas in a box or case, priced lower than if bought individually.
The idea is to include a small quantity to keep the price attractive. Your customers will likely return to buy their favourites in larger quantities!
Conclusion
Winter is the time of year when you can make a significant portion of your annual revenue.
Plan the season, focusing on meeting your customers’ needs during peak demand months.
Adapt your stock with winter flavours and ingredients, promote your new items, let customers sample them, and organize workshops and other engaging events to ensure a successful winter season!
