Flavors For Every Season – Dorje Teas, A Small Business By Two Friends

 

“Fresh, organic, single estate” as the front page of the company’s website states, Dorje Teas explain right away where the word stems from. Darjeeling as we know it is the fusion of the words Dorje (thunderbolt) and Ling (land), thereby making it the land where the thunderbolt of Lord Indra fell.

Selim Hill Tea Garden is where the lovely Darjeeling tea comes from, an organic tea estate amongst 73 others in the city while India constitutes of over 10,000 tea gardens. The company run by two friends, Sparsh Agarwal and Ishaan Kanoria. With both the boys’ families having been in the Darjeeling Tea Business and Sparsh’s family owning the Selim Hill Tea Garden since 1990.

It was then that the pandemic hit when the business that depended on export market was sinking and as things got worse their alternative to come out of this was to sell away the tea garden. Sparsh on the other hand had little to nothing to do with the family business as he worked with the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi. However, when he heard the news of his family considering selling their tea garden, he happened to discuss this with his friends, it was then when they asked him if they could somehow help him get the business back on track.
With this, things took a quick turn and his friends, Ishaan Kanoria, an investment banker and Anant Gupta, a graduate of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) with the approval of Sparsh’s parents got involved in the business and hope to save the long-grown heritage of the Darjeeling tea business.

Their mentor through all this has been the fourth generation, now former owner of the Makaibari tea estate, Rajah Banerjee known to be a legend in the tea industry. Along with being a mentor to this venture of the two friends, Rajah is also an investor and a brand ambassador for the company.

Their venture and plan to turnaround the business worked on a simple yet efficient subscription model. The tea is directly sold to the customers cutting out the middlemen and the inefficiency of having middlemen that benefits neither the customer nor the owner. The subscription model works with customers having to pay a small sum of Rupees 2,100 for an entire year’s supply worth of ‘fresh, organic, single estate tea’.

The seasonal harvests are divided in spring (first flush), summer (second flush), monsoon (third flush) and autumn (fourth flush). While the first two flushes are sold at a premium as it is the best tea of all the flushes and especially exported in the international market. The market for the latter two flushes, the monsoon and the autumn isn’t quite there. This gave them the opportunity to also consider the domestic market and created the subscription model. The annual subscription that sells at Rupees 2,100 per year delivers tea from each flush to the customer throughout the course of the year.

The monsoon and autumn flushes are cheaper, and the Indian customer nevertheless doesn’t get the first two flushes as they are exported. The first two flushes, the spring and summer are sold between a range of Rupees 5,000 to 10,000 per kg. However, with the annual subscription, customers get 250 g each of all four flushes. And in any case that customers want more of the tea, they can have the packets delivered every month. For every subscriber of the company, they are deemed as supporters and with the help of the Selim Hill Collective, a tree is planted in their name.

Along with this, Sparsh and his family under the chairmanship of Rajah Banerjee have established the Selim Hill Collective to as they call it, “reimagine the space of the tea estate” bringing back to life the tea garden and focusing with a reforestation campaign to begin with. They also want to focus on other important aspects such as community welfare and the conservation of wildlife. The goal aiming towards giving back to the farm and its people.