The TeaShed’s Jules Quinn on the power of team-brand-product in growing a B2B business into an eCommerce business (episode 046)

Jules Quinn is the founder of Online Only eCommerce business TeaShed, with a strong wholesale arm. This year she was named by Forbes magazine as one of the 30 under 30 in retail and eCommerce. She’s been running TeaShed since 2011 and they’ve grown to have 16 people in the team.

Click to Tweet: This week on the @eComMasterPlan #podcast Jules Quinn’s talking tea and lets us know what’s brewing at The TeaShed

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Jules Quinn of The TeaShed
About the business

Listen to hear how Jules got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

There are 2 things that really excite Jules about her business right now. Firstly Jules finds the product itself really exciting and very cool as well as it tasting amazing it is something totally different. The second thing is Jules’ team they really care about the product and the business everyone is happy so it is a fantastic environment to work in.

Listen to hear more about how The Teashed built their brand

On the Radar for the Coming Months

The most important thing on Jules’ to do list for the next couple of months is to increase the brand’s social media following. The team are already working with some Instafamous people and vloggers. They have a pop up event planned for Newcastle and will be launching their popable range into bars.

Creating the TeaShed Brand

Jules recognise how important the TeaShed brand is and the team spent a lot of time getting it right – creating a buzz around tea whilst ensuring that quality shone through. The team used mood boards to expore what other businesses were doing making sure that TeaShed used the right language and types of hashtags for their products. TeaShed do not out source anything everything is done in house – Jules is the voice of Teashed and can’t imagine handing that position over to anyone else.

The Teashed have had a lot of success with pop up tea shops they have found them a great way of showcasing the brand – they are fairly low risk and if carried out in conjunction with other businesses can be fairly low cost. Jules says you can take looks of photographs for social media and really show everyone what your brand is really about. The Teashed do find that they take quite a lot of planning, up to 6 months. The popup shops are not about making a profit for Jules that is a bonus it is all about getting the brand name out there.

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

eCommerce Book Top Tip

Gung Ho Ken Blanchard

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

Jules has found that Facebook Post Boosts Advertising has been really effective for the TeaShed driving traffic to their website and importantly resulting in sales.

Tool Top Tip

The Teashed team use a tool called Pipedrive you can enter all your sales information, when you first made contact with a customer and it will give you a visible representation of your pipeline.

Start Up Top Tip

Jules advises that you get your social media accounts sorted out straight away – obviously choosing a name is very important. She feels that once you have made that important decision you need to lock down everything else with that name before you invest any time and money in it.

If your business didn’t exist, which eCommerce Business Would you like to be Running?

If Jules wasn’t running The TeaShed she would like to be running an eCommerce grocery business. She has no qualms in saying her reason is mainly because she would like to try out all the free samples of food and drink businesses would send them!

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