Q&A with Brooklyn Tea Co-Owner Jamila McGill- Part Two
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 two of our great conversation talking about the naming process, go-to tea flavors right now, vendor & menu selection, and words of wisdom for future entrepreneurs!
How did you pair up with your food vendors and build your menu?
Jamila McGill: When we first started thinking about what the store was going to be, it was just going to be tea, cookies, and cupcakes - that was it. We imagined ourselves to be some small tea house. In the beginning, we were doing pop-ups at festivals; we happened to be next to Uptown Vegan while we were out in The Bronx, and we were next to her for two festivals and we were trading off our goods - she was using our tea and we were eating her cupcakes and cookies. We just established from there when we did open the store that she would definitely be a part of the Brooklyn Tea family, and we just kept the word on that.
That was great because with vegan pastries, what we began to see was that we could serve everybody! That’s the thing with tea and the community that we are trying to build, this idea of being able to serve everyone and everyone can be taken care of. It just so happened that for us the person next to us was doing vegan food and we just saw how much sense it made to serve our community to do so, and because her stuff is so good you don’t have to split things up like, “I have to buy vegan cupcakes and dairy cupcakes;” like no, we have a really great cupcake and it’s vegan, that’s it! The adding on of more items to the menu honestly was a push from our customers, of my Brooklyn Tea family members, like, “Hey, if I’m going to be here, you gotta give me more!” One of the customers suggested that we get banana bread, so we asked Drea to do that; B Cake NY does our Biggie cookies that people, including myself, love – again, it’s a nod to the legend and we are in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. She also does our matcha cookies as well; we met her at a pop-up event at a cycling center and she was coming out of her class. If you know anything about B Cake NY, she is a celebrity pastry chef, she’s amazing, I encourage everyone to go to her if you’re looking for anything decadent and extravagant. So she was coming out of her class trying our teas and she said if you’re thinking about adding pastries, let’s link-up; so that took care of that.
Then we have vegan brownies that are plantain-based and that was also at a festival, Vegan Fest; there was a company called Kelewele next to us, so I wanted to see what vegan pastries we could explore; I saw that she had vegan brownies, so that was a quick DM: “Hey, we were next to each other at the festival, let’s make it happen,” so that’s been a great relationship! Lastly, we actually added breakfast food; the waffles are amazing, and I knew everyone was going to love it! That’s how Ali got me hooked! Well, one is his great personality, two was his love and appreciation of sharing of tea, and three were his awesome chef activities; he was so good at cooking and he used to make me waffles all the time -waffles and tea, really! So when we thought about what the menu was going to be, yes, I suggested the waffles - that’s because he made good waffles (laughs) - and that it would work, and it wasn’t in the area; no one within a mile radius sells waffles, and everyone loves them! So we started that and English muffins since there aren’t a lot of breakfast options around here, and that dwindles even more if we talk about vegan options. So yes, the English muffin is vegan for those asking; vegan cheese, it is delicious for anyone else asking! And that’s our menu! We really weren’t going to have added food; we didn’t know how we were going to have the capacity to do it and we didn’t see ourselves as that kind of storefront, so we definitely were hardheaded and stubborn, but once got it cooking (no pun intended), it totally changed, I think, the customers’ experience of being able to have a tea, read a book, eat a waffle; it was more like home. A customer explained it in a very great way that made me cave, in which Brooklyn Tea is centered around community, around having a communal experience with folks, and what do most people want when they are having a communal experience? Food! So when they said that I caved in, and there you have it, we have a real menu!
Was it always going to be Brooklyn Tea, or was the name more dictated around the choosing of the actual storefront location?
JM: No we went through several different names. We actually still have the cup of one of the original names. So we played around with different names that connected to neighborhood and community; I keep saying (term) but that is such a big piece of who we are, and just the shared experience. There we several different names that were thrown out there; at the time Ali was in DC, I was here in Brooklyn, so we were long-distance for two years, and the conversation started shifting toward him coming up here and us moving in together, and somewhere in between talking about moving in together and actually doing it, the name Brooklyn Tea came up because that is the start of own journey together as a couple - officially living together and figuring out what that means - and I fought him a bit on it because I had some intentions of us moving to Atlanta. That’s where I’m from - I had been in the city (NYC) at that point for seven years, and so I was ready to move on and be home.
Ali, who had his feet firmly planted on the ground, was like, “Hey, I see this for us.” It’s kind of cliché that if you can make it here (NYC) you can make it anywhere; the point he was making of saying there’s something about the magic of starting it here in Brooklyn and then down the road opening it up in Atlanta or wherever we go in the future. Brooklyn carries some weight; it’s a name heard around the world - you could go to Japan and could very well find a club or a shop called Brooklyn because that’s just how much cultural currency it has. Brooklyn has a cool factor and it was undeniable, even if I was trying to get him to move to Atlanta, and so we settled on that name and kind of went full steam ahead. Also, Ali was born here; his parents met in a basement party in Brooklyn.
What are your go-to teas - with everything that has been going on in the world right now, what teas have helped you get through all of this?
JM: I’ve been doing a mix of the Vanilla Rooibos, a South African Bush Tea with vanilla and almond, and been mixing it with Chai, which is a homemade blend from Ali, so I get a little bit of the extra sweetness from the vanilla bean but also a little bit of the caffeine from the Chai and the spiciness of it, and I’ve been doing that over ice with a macadamia nut milk and honey; it’s like a great hug and just an energy booster and I love that one. Ali is an Oolong guy; his favorite is Zen Gaba Oolong. Oolong is pretty dope and special because it’s one of the few teas that get better as you re-steep it; a lot of teas lose their taste and flavor when you pour the water back over the leaves but Oolong gets better with time, and a third steep is my favorite. Oolong is great for focus and clarity, and clearly we need a lot of that right now (ha)!
What has been a great blessing and what’s been a really great lesson that you have learned this year so far?
JM: Aside from the blessing of the Shonda Rhimes tweet and the Beyoncé feature, I would say the blessing out of all these increased sales has been being able to hold true to our commitment to support the community. We started a Brooklyn Tea scholarship - we awarded money to one of our staff members who got accepted to Clark-Atlanta University - and we also made a donation to a local early childhood development center, Little Sun People, and that felt so good to finally be in the space to walk the walk, to have the money to do the things we always sought out to do, so that has been the blessing!
A good lesson, this talking more about trying to scale-up to meet the demand, is stepping outside of whatever the bubble is of doing the task at hand is and stepping outside of that to see the bigger picture and see what needs to be changed systematically such as what is in the system management that needs to be changed to get better and to get faster. Because if we’re just trying to get better and faster by doing just the same thing that we’re doing, where we’re still only sending out 30 boxes a day, but if we take this 10-15 minutes to not do that even though it feels urgent to pack the pouch, but take that 15 minutes outside of that to think about how to actually change what we’re doing, how to buy something that makes labels faster or whatever it may be. Taking that time out to actually think about how to make the business stronger is how you actually get to scale up; that was very hard for me because I can be very task-oriented, so it can seem like the smartest thing to do is just to figure out how to put pouches in the tea faster, but oh no, I need to figure out how to make the labels faster by getting a system on how to get the labels faster.
Any words of wisdom that you want to bestow on anyone who may be wanting to start a business and maybe inspired to step outside what they have been doing and take a leap of faith?
JM: I would say if you are trying to be an entrepreneur, Ali says this best, if you’re trying to be an entrepreneur because you just don’t want to have a boss, don’ t be an entrepreneur - you’re not going to like it! You’re not going to like it if you’re doing it just because you don’t want to be someone’s employee; you have to have another motivating factor because this is gruesome work. We say all the time that we are the CEOs and the janitors; it is very nice and lovely to be featured in these different spaces, be it a news show on CBS, but when the water in the toilet turns brown, that’s for you to fix! It has to be an outside motivating factor, and finding what that is is very crucial, because the days can be very dreary if that’s it! I’ll also say never underestimate the value of a business plan; it allows you to catch a lot of pitfalls in your thinking. Have a focus group before you have a soft launch; sometimes people think a soft launch is where you get all your feedback, but do your feedback even before then. Your soft launch should be your second or third round of feedback, but the first round should be in your focus group. Have a couple of friends over that you know will be pretty neutral in opinion; shoot them your ideas or if you have one, shoot them your menu. Those would be some of the things I would say people should take home and mull over!
