Today we’d like to introduce you to So-Han Fan.
Hi So-Han, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My father is from Hong Kong, so I grew up drinking Chinese tea. At home we just drank Lipton tea out of tea bags, but we went out on weekends to get dim sum since before I can remember. There, we drank loose-leaf Chinese tea that we selected from a list before the meal started. It wasn’t until I got to college in 2002 that I became interested in tea as a subject. I went to school in Santa Cruz, California, and one day I stumbled into a small local tea shop and had my first sip of gong fu-style tea, poured from a stone teapot and served in a tiny ceramic cup. The beauty of the wares and the elegance of the practice fascinated me, and of course the taste, fragrance, and sensation of the tea itself. I bought my first tea set a few weeks later in San Francisco’s Chinatown and started serving tea to my friends – I wasn’t old enough to go to bars or buy alcohol so tea quickly became my main social activity. Not only was it a great way to spend time with my friends, it was a way to share Chinese culture with people that was fun and accessible. After spending a few years teaching informal classes locally in Santa Cruz, I moved to Austin in 2008, taking a job as tea sommelier at the now-defunct Jade Leaves Tea House on Guadalupe. This was the foundation of our current Austin tea culture – I taught classes on how to pour tea to a rapidly-growing community of enthusiasts.
When I moved to China in 2010, many of these enthusiasts continued pouring tea for their friends in my absence, growing the community organically. My primary job in China wasn’t sourcing tea – I was there as an intern for an organization called Chengdu Urban Rivers Association, doing research on freshwater environmental remediation. I spent my free time during my three year duration in China by traveling to tea farms and meeting tea farmers and tea masters. My exploration was primarily just as a tea lover, and I found that the tea that I had in China, direct from the farms, was orders of magnitude better than any tea I’d had in the United States. On my return to Austin, I discovered that tea culture was alive and well, although very small, in Austin – carried on by individuals in their homes in the absence of a tea house or tea import company. Of course, I had brought a lot of tea from my farmer friends in China, which I shared with the community when I returned. We quickly drank everything I could bring over in my checked luggage, leaving me tea-less, and I endeavored to order more tea from my connections in China. My Austin tea friends threw in on the order to help with shipping costs, and we shipped about $700 worth of tea from China to Austin.
Unfortunately, one cannot simply ship tea from China to the United States – tea is an agricultural product and requires FDA certification. The box got sent back to China, and I spent the next eight months figuring out how to get it back, which involved registering a business and an FDA receiving facility. A few months later, the medical consulting company that I had been working as a researcher for folded, and I found myself unemployed, but with a registered tea import business. I began serving tea for free twice a week and selling loose leaf tea out of my friend’s jewelry studio. The Austin community was largely naive to Chinese tea culture, and we gradually grew the community through regular tea service as well as setting up tea lounges at various festivals, parties, and meet ups. We began our first brick and mortar tea house, The Tea Spot, in 2014. It was a 200-square foot space situated at the back of Spider House, underneath a tattoo parlor. Within two years we had outgrown the single room and opened Guan Yin Tea House in a 3,000-square foot space on I-35, just north of Airport Blvd. There, we continued to grow the culture and community by offering classes, various public events, and full-scale dance parties with DJ’s, tea service, dynamic lighting and decorations.
These parties were alcohol-free and often went until 3 or 4 AM, often with more than a hundred guests over the course of the night. In 2020 we closed the tea house to renovate and rebrand right at the beginning of the pandemic. Unable to hold live events or physical tea service, we survived the year by pivoting to focus on e-commerce. We renamed the tea house to West China Tea, the same as our website and import company. We have gradually expanded our physical service and retail as the pandemic wanes, and have expanded our reach globally as a result of shifting our focus to our online presence. We now have a large and diverse team of Austin locals, and are preparing to return to in-person physical gatherings – including parties – when it becomes safe to do so. In the meantime, we have introduced a membership program, where members can come and enjoy tea at the tea house in our new outdoor seating spaces. As a Chinese-American, and recent husband and father, my passion for sharing tea comes not only from my love for Chinese culture but also fostering healthy, connective, alcohol-free space for people to socialize and build community.
Tea is fundamentally inclusive – it can be enjoyed by people with religious or health prohibitions around consuming alcohol, including children, and creates a family-friendly environment. People who are completely uninitiated in the deep and broad world of Chinese tea culture can still sit and enjoy drinking tea without having to know anything at all, beyond how to drink liquids. In our increasingly virtual and divided society, tea culture and tea houses provide an ideal place to authentically connect and build community.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has certainly not been a smooth road! I bootstrapped this company – I had neither the wealth nor the connections to acquire substantial loans or investment, and the growth of the company has been perennially stunted by the need to both expand our inventory of products – tea and tea ware – as well as hiring, growing the infrastructure of the company, and paying rent. Until 2020 we were almost exclusively an in-person business. When the pandemic hit, we had already closed the tea house in order to renovate and restructure. We are still renting the tea house, which is a large space with expensive rent. Our landlord initially agreed to defer part of our rent through the duration of the pandemic, but quickly backpedaled on the agreement, not only charging us full rent but attempting to charge us rent we had already paid, as well as late fees on that rent. It was only due to the pro-bono legal representation of an attorney who is a friend of the tea house that we were able to keep the space without being charged unfair rent and late fees. Unable to use the tea house to make money, we were forced to pivot to being a primarily e-commerce company. This necessitated a rapid growth in the size of the company, growing from three full-time employees to seven currently, as well as five hourly employees. This team was necessary to build the website with professional quality product photos, descriptions, make and maintain website infrastructure, market the site, inventory, package, and ship the tea, and organize and administer our efforts.
In August, unbeknownst to the team, our e-commerce platform experienced a month-long service interruption that prevented about 1/3 of our customers from completing transactions on the site. Our revenue that month was just over half of the previous month and we were faced with imminent bankruptcy. We were forced to start a GoFundMe in order to stay in business, raising more than $15,000 in a month from our broad community of tea friends. The past year has in fact been a non-stop sequence of setbacks and challenges, whereby we continually pivot and grow to rise to the occasion. When the pandemic hit we went online; when the website broke we held a fundraiser; when the landlord tried to charge us money we had already paid, we got legal representation; further challenges have included the polar vortex, which shut down both physical and online operations for two weeks, as well as the simultaneous and premature birth of my first child after a very complicated pregnancy.
This most recent challenge has seen a necessity for me to step back from my role at the company to focus on spending time with and taking care of my new family, and having faith in our team to keep the lights on. One of the main challenges to keeping the business solvent has been the ongoing pandemic, which has seen more than a quarter of all small businesses in the United States permanently close. Without clear guidance or support from the government, we’ve been left to adapt both to the legal and ethical demands of remaining closed and the financial prerogative to open up. We have remained closed or at limited capacity up until the present time, and the rent on the tea house is a huge financial liability. We continue to remain constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, despite having a successful business model and growing the revenue of the company 2.5x in the midst of the pandemic. To put it bluntly, every month in business could be our last, as we struggle to meet our expenses and continue to grow our inventory and revenue.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
West China Tea specializes in importing farm-direct Chinese tea and artisan tea ware, providing training and education in the art of gong fu cha, the Chinese tea service, and hosting events and community space around this practice. We are currently in our fourth year of running a local tea house in Austin, which is also our fulfillment center for our online business. While many tea businesses source a broad range of teas from different countries by purchasing from large-scale import companies. These companies have contracts with various tea factories that produce tea on an industrial scale and ship by the container-full. We pride ourselves on sourcing each of our teas and tea wares directly from the farmers and artisans who produce them, delivering a true farm-to-cup experience and building a transnational connection between the producers and our customers. This allows us to offer rare teas found nowhere else in the West, and a level of artisanal quality that is rarely seen outside of China. As an Asian-American owned company with a diverse staff, we focus on cultivating inclusive community in an alcohol-free environment that both helps to share Chinese culture and develop our own Texas brand of tea culture.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. As a mixed race person, I struggled with finding a sense of identity growing up. My interest in my Chinese heritage was rarely shared with my Asian-American peers, so I found myself exploring my culture more or less on my own. As a kid I was into science, especially marine science, which is what I eventually got my degree in. As the only Asian kid in my class through all of elementary and middle school, I got picked on a lot, and found that any efforts to conform in order to be included were fruitless. By high school, I forged an identity around my own unique self-expression, and stopped caring about whether I would be included or not. I think that this experience of being excluded helps to drive my passion for creating inclusive space.
Pricing:
- Self Service – $25/hour
- Hosted Tea Tasting – $50/hour
- Monthly Membership – $100
- Introductory Gong Fu Cha Class – $40
- Starter Tea Set – $65
Contact Info:
- Email: teamaster@westchinatea.com
- Website: westchinatea.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/westchinatea/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WestChinaTeaHouse
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg_-d3VHLMGiM6fuGRB0FtA
Image Credits
Montsho Thoth
