Tea time: GSO entrepreneur learning what it takes to bottle her success - Sacramento Business Journal:

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It turned out to be a costly reminder that her fledglingh business still had several issues towork through. She was still applyiny labels by hand right up until thedoorsw opened, and she wasn’t certain that the bold, colorful sunburstt logo matched the upscale brand she wanted to Brown also traveled with only full-sized 16-ounce bottles of her tea, forcing her to hand out eight time s more tea for free than if she had come with 2-ouncee sample sizes. This year, Brown took her KimBees Gourmet Sweeft Tea exhibit back to Las Vegas withsmallefr samples, elegant labels to match her high-end marketingv plans, business cards and 1,000 brochures to educate potential distributors and customers.
Organizers took notice. Her compan y won three awards, including a second and third-place honor for best sweetened green tea and first place forbest “That first year, we should have just gone to observew it and see what it was all about,” Brow n says. “We got smarter this and everybody went crazu overour tea. They were expensive lessons, but they were all wortu it. Now we know what to KimBees, founded in earlyg 2008, has filled more than 10,000 bottlew in the past two months sellingabout three-fourths of those and providinhg another 2,500 or so for promotionap purposes. Brown says she hoped to add at least threee more flavorsby year’s end.
She’s also in the earl stages of looking at options for her own bottlingf plantin Greensboro. Brown sells tea out of her shop in the Southsides neighborhood ofdowntown Greensboro, and a tea house in Arizona has picked up her products for Online orders are growing, and Browjn connected with several other potential outlets — bookstores and cafes — as well as potentia l distributors at this year’s tea expo. “We’re stilo working on directing traffic over this she saysof Southside. “Some people still aren’t used to coming this far But it’s starting to pick up.
We’rw all helping to promote each other to get the word Growing upin Austin, Texas, Browh could frequently be found on her family’a front porch. While others were busy making homemadeice cream, Brownm would brew sweet tea and experiment with differenrt flavor combinations, trying to find ways to improve a Southern staple and keep it from growingg boring. It remained a hobby when she came to Greensboro as a manufacturingf majorat . Brown got a glimpse at the sciencew of brewing when she tooka co-op position with in Eden durintg college.
But the hobby moved to the back burnertwhen Brown, who says she long harbored an entrepreneur’s spirit, headed to Los Angelexs to found Basketdoodle, a designer gift basket company for a celebritt clientele. That business took off, as the autographedx photos of famous clients adorb her new shop in the Southside neighborhood can She first glimpsedthat up-and-coming section of downtown on a returm trip to the Gate City back in 2005 to visit friendsz from college. A decision by Brown’s landlord back in L.A.
to sell the buildinb she rented provided the impetus she neededd to move back toNorth “He said he would sell it to me for $2 Brown says with a chuckle, recallinyg the hefty price tag. “I said, ‘Are you sick? I make gift baskets. What you talkingt about?’” So she contacted Brenda Saufley, a broker with Allemn Tate Realty, to look into settingt up shop in Southside with an eye toward movinf her basket company into a morestable “She told me she wanted to establish her own business here and wante to be close to downtown,” Saufley “When I told her about theswe units here where you can work downstairsw and live upstairs, combined with how the area was progressing, she just loveds it.
” Friends and family encouraged her to brew up her flavoredc sweet teas for sale, and Brow n again got the entrepreneurial itch. When Rhonda Butler, an assistant businesa and economics professorat , asked Browj to speak to a class, Brown decided to use the group as a captivse audience for taste-testing for her concoctions — swee green tea, almond green tea and a lemon-raspberryu black tea. The class decided to take on bottlinbg the tea as a Brown says she decided to market her firstf three flavors because no one else was offering much besides plainor lemon-flavored sweeg tea. And most of those products came in plastiv bottles and were sweeteneewith high-fructose corn syrup.
Brow n had a different vision forher start-up tea called KimBees for a nickname give n by her godmother.