Q&A with Brooklyn Tea Co-Owner Jamila McGill- Part One
Before I moved back to NYC last April, one of the stops I know I wanted to make was to Brooklyn Tea! Their social media presence was amazing and the positive posts poured in and made it a must for this tea lover! Fast forward to the end of 2019 I finally got a chance to meet a friend there and there was an inviting vibe to the place and the tea was top-notch! I had originally planned to do this interview in person the week that the city eventually shut everything down due to COVID and with everything going on, finally got a chance recently to connect with Jamila McGill, one-half of the couple co-owners along with Ali Wright, of Brooklyn Tea. Here’s part one of our great conversation talking about online ordering, social media, pivoting, and the excitement and joy of being recognized by Shonda Rhimes and Beyonce for their business! Stay tuned for part two next week!
How are you doing with everything that has been going on?
Jamila McGill: I am in this beautiful and complicated feeling of gratefulness - we’ve received a lot of great press as of late, but also the anxiety of trying to keep up with some of the rise (of orders) that comes with the press. Also, kind of like a jerk of going from one reality of COVID happening, we’re going to have to close our store in its original model and how our sales dramatically decreased from that, and then fast forward a month after that, we’re seeing numbers that we never could have predicted! That switch from one reality to the next definitely has our head spinning, but it’s great!
What was the original plan you had envisioned for this year and the business? And can you talk about how you had to pivot, as you alluded to earlier, with the onset of COVID? Based on your social media, you seemed to be moving more into in-store hosting events and partnering with companies for on-site offerings, etc.
JM: It was such a drastic shift from what we had envisioned for 2020. We set our eyes on getting more outside the shop, doing more pop-ups, a great leg of the business if you will comes from Black History Month and just the amount of partnerships that we had going out to Netflix, Google, or Facebook or We Work spaces. And so we just saw the success that came from being outside of the store, especially as the business owners and getting our face out there more, so we had our sights turned on being outside the store more, which is really funny since that is the exact opposite of COVID. So when we talk about shifts, it is the exact opposite of what we had planned (laughs) for the year; so we had to pivot to being more internal and going more to the online sales. We started online in 2017, then we opened the brick & mortar in December of 2018, [so] it wasn’t like the online front was a completely new territory for us, but we had never really had much of our revenue come from the online component at that time.
So we had to get more creative about how do we attract people to e-commerce. We’ve always thought about what does our customer need in the moment. The moment was COVID; it was about people’s sense of urgency around boosting their immunity, and we curated the Immunity Box that was packed with teas with research behind it that was proven to be anti-viral and anti-bacterial, just packed it with a lot of love, and sending the message that here’s something to take care of you while you are stuck at home or something that you can send to someone to let them know that they are being thought of and being cared for, even if from afar. We started to see an uptick after the curation of those boxes and from then on it was pushing our social media platform to be more face-forward. I would say before COVID, we led more with just the product itself, us tapping into it every once in awhile, but it was really product-focused and I don’t really know if we had intentions of ever being as visible as we are now!
I found out about your store originally through Instagram before I had moved back to NYC last year. How important was social media within your business plan, and how are you looking to grow that even more so now, such as being more visible with the videos? How do you divvy up the business and each of your contributions? From what I understand, Ali is the tea sommelier and is more product-focused.
JM: I have to give credit to Ali. He’s a digital marketer by trade, and so the life of social media platforms is his wheelhouse, even prior to the tea for him being a professional aspect of his life. Even before, there was him working with different companies, even the Partners of Education, working with them on their digital media platforms, so that has always been a centerpiece of the business plan, what the company marketing plan was going to be. I think as time has gone by, I’ve been able to stretch my arms a little bit and get my hands in there a little bit more because Brooklyn Tea is a combination of our two different personalities so Ali, even in the aesthetic of the place, he’s more straight lines and monolithic colors, and I’m more that splash of color, and to make our social media platforms work, we both have to work on those, and in many ways in equal measure. Sometimes he may generate ideas, and maybe I’m better at executing ideas, but I think what people are gravitating toward is us working cohesively on bringing both our personalities to the social media space, and so you will see if you have been on the page, our “Good Morning BedStuy.” The videos are more of a shift that you were asking about earlier and as I was alluding to as part of that shift from being more product-focused to having me do the “Good Morning BedStuy” and having us really talk as a couple, because that’s who we are, this is our baby [the business], a company born out of love and appreciation, not just for tea but of each other. We knew if people were going to be missing us at the store, we had to welcome them in virtually.
Now that places are starting to be able to open up, where do you see the business for the rest of this year? How are you taking some of these challenges and turning them into new grand plans?
JM: I want to say I have this perfect queued up answer for you (laughs). One is now that we have this new influx of family members/customers hooked on tea, we definitely want to introduce subscription boxes down the road. We got a lot of inquiries of people calling the store after ordering online, “How can I get around this whole process - I just want you to send me the tea!” (laughs), that is more than one person asking about sending in payments one time and then, “Leave me alone and the tea shows up!” I get it - people don’t want to click on payment method again, they don’t want to put in shipment address one more time, they want to get their tea and be left alone! We hope to bring that (subscription box) to people in the coming months, that’s a thing I can speak to more clearly about. Something that’s more in the ether is this influx of sales because of the recent press [because] we had a tweet from Shonda Rhimes, and we’re lucky enough to get a shout out in Beyoncé’s site listing Black businesses.
What was that feeling of joy like with the Shonda Rhimes tweet and the Beyoncé listing on her site?
JM: The Shonda Rhimes tweet and the Beyoncé feature, I can’t believe I’m even saying those two things lol! Both times, we were in the shop, we already had an increase in sales because of the nature of Blackout Tuesday, Tag a Black Business, so we were already starting to see an increase that we never had seen before. We also got highlighted in New York Magazine and USA Today, so that had already happened. We were in the store late for about a month now, so I’m in my chair just trying to put some labels on some pouches and my friend, both times it was a friend sending me a screenshot that I’m just not believing! The immediate reaction is Jamila falls to the floor (laughs), screams, cries, screams some more, shouts Beyoncé’s name, Shonda’s name to the rooftop! I’m more joy and panic at the same time, “Oh my god, how are going to do this?!” You know when a name hits, it’s going to come with some new work. You know it means we are going to be working longer hours for a few more weeks now! It’s an incredible feeling to be acknowledged in that way! We just turned a year and a half on the 22nd (of June) and we really are just a small tea shop, so to be seen and valued by our heroes, it’s incredible! I would have never seen it coming! So the sky is the limit at this point. If I would speak to the truth and fear, the unknowing of the moment and how much of this is long-lasting. Trying to understand what sustainability looks like after you have these type of peaks is interesting and a little bit more difficult because it’s easier to forecast last July versus this July in a typical business setting, and this is incredibly different; trying to forecast out about how much of this we can hopefully retain is a challenge. We definitely invite the challenge and hope to keep a lot of the customers since they love the tea just the same. Even if no one else shouts out for the rest of the year, they believe in the brand and the quality of the product; but that part is challenging!
Are we going to see a tea named after Beyoncé and what would it contain/what would be the flavor?
JM: It has to be something that gives me a Southern Texas vibe. Southerners like something very bright -iced tea/sweet tea; I’m a Georgia girl, so I’m thinking of things that speak to my heart, as a southern girl. Something maybe citrusy, something sweet and smokey, (that’s) very Texas with the BBQ. Also just in personality, Beyoncé is that kind of sweet and smokey persona! You definitely have given us a great question to mull over and have to put some credit out to you, so thank you (laughs)!
I love the names such as Relax Relate Release and She’s Gotta Have It and the Wakanda-inspired flavor; who does the naming and how do you continue to pair and introduce new flavors to your collection?
JM: I feel like Ali has come up with a lot of them, and we just come up with them together just knowing that there’s a tea that needs to have its own name. A lot of those have their roots in Black cultural experience. Wakanda, being a nod to Black Panther; She’s Gotta Have It being a nod to Spike Lee’s first film, Relax Relate Release from A Different World. And that was the point - if you know then you know! The Relax Relate Release was the first one we created as a nod to Black culture and it’s interesting to see how people come up and will say it just in the way Whitley Gilbert would say it; the cadence is perfect, the pitch is perfect. It’s fun to have the interaction with people, and those naming conventions give a little glimpse into who we are and what we appreciate and can vibe with us as a customer.
