In one sentence, what is your product/service?

We are BRUU, the UK’s first gourmet tea club delivering super tasty ethically sourced tea through your letterbox every month.

What problem(s) does it solve?

The problem is tea bags. 

If you drink coffee you know that fresh ground beans taste a lot better than off-the-shelf instant coffee. It’s the reason why Costa and Starbucks have grown so fast. 

To us, teabags are like instant coffee. Convenient, cheap, readily available but very average tasting.

We wanted to introduce tea drinkers to a better BRUU and make it both easier and more affordable for them to try out lots of new tasty teas each month. We pride ourselves on selling the best tea – you will be hard pressed to find a better tasting tea in the UK.

What are your immediate goals?

We would like to introduce as many people as possible to a better tasting brew. For them to ditch the dreaded tea bag and to taste tea at its very finest. 

How will the company make money?

Customers sign up to our tea club and pay a monthly subscription to receive different teas each month. The tea we sell is very expensive, but our model means we can offer customers the tea at a more affordable price.

We could have sold lower grade tea leaves like a lot of other companies do, but we wanted to sell the best which ended up costing twice as much. 

What were the biggest challenges involved in building the tech or your team?

The biggest challenge is how we are limited by our platform. We are using Shopify for its stability and speed but as the business grows we will need greater functionality and customer personalisation so at this point we will look to build our own system, or potentially consider using Magento.

Who is in your team?

There are five people in our team who all absolutely love tea. We expect to see this number double before the end of the year. 

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

In one year I would like BRUU to be recognised as selling the best tasting tea in the UK online.

Looking further ahead we would like to expand this internationally and open a chain of retail premises to spread the word offline. 

Other than your own, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

I really love the app Pocket. It connects with your phone and web browser and lets you save interesting articles to read later.

You read them in Pocket and it standardises fonts and images to make it easier to read and faster to load. It is awesome.

I also really love Rapportive for Gmail which shows your additional information on your contact inside your inbox, so you can connect with them socially with one click.