Meet Our Makers: Arjun Kumar, Managing Director of XO Tea

Arjun Kumar is the Managing Director of XO Tea, a Western Australian owned and operated tea business. Kumar’s family have been growing tea in Malaysia and India for over 85 years. XO’s loose-leaf offerings are both retail and service friendly, with all the right provenance and quality credentials.

XO Tea connects the past and present, offering a range which is traditional and yet modern. Every product and ingredient used has been sourced from origins where they occur natively and are selected for their characteristics and flavour profile.

C&C: Can you tell us a bit about the early days of XO Tea? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Arjun: I never really had any formal tea training, I just happened to be back from America (where I was working as an engineer) and I went to a T2 store just randomly to buy some tea, because I drank a lot of tea. 

I kind of thought that I could give this a go in an organic sense - I felt like there were a lot of conventional teas out there, a lot flavoured teas and not much pure herb tea products at that time ten years ago. 

My family had been making tea forever so I had a decent understanding of black tea, but I basically used that opportunity to learn a lot more. I spent a lot of time in Malaysia at tea estates and the gardens learning a lot about production, harvesting and farming of the tea. It snowballed from there and turned into a brand that had fifteen SKUs. We found our feet in different avenues of sale with tea and different markets with foodservice, hotels, online, bulk - not just retail and grocery. Anything that can incorporate tea usage basically.

It started from my family having a long history of tea manufacturing (and they still do, with big tea gardens that operate over there) and me walking into a T2 store thinking that there wasn’t a huge selection of organic teas and a lot of flavoured teas rather than pure teas. So that’s why I started the idea and the concept and it went from there.

C&C: Your website mentions that ‘every product and ingredient used has been sourced from origins where they occur natively’. Can you tell us a bit about why this is important to XO Tea?

Arjun: A lot of the herbs that we use have particular growing requirements and can’t be grown everywhere. It’s important to source from those locations to get the best quality that you can and keep the farming methods sustainable. For example, all of our lavender comes from Europe because Europe, France and Albania have been producing lavender for hundreds of years. You can also buy Chinese lavender made in a greenhouse - the taste and the quality isn’t as good, but the appearance is nicer. But if we want to support lavender farming in Europe (where it originated from), then we have to support those industries - so that’s why we do it.

C&C: Turning to the packaging of the teas, we read that the imagery and names are designed to to personify the product itself while also being sustainable (with your compostable and biodegradable teabags for example). Why is this good design and sustainability important to XO Tea?

Arjun: I like to have people buy a product off the shelf, consume it and then be able to recycle and compost it to have nothing left of the product. It is a natural product - there’s no additions and additives. It’s literally produce that’s cut and sifted and then blended together to make a consumable product. After you’re done consuming it, you’ve got to go back to nature the way it started. So it’s really important for us to have that, as much as we can where practically possible, to have a product that starts as a garden and ends up in compost. I think that’s really valuable to a lot of customers as well. 

C&C: What has the process of getting XO Tea ‘on the shelf’ and into retailers been like?

Arjun: Tea is a very difficult item to sell. It’s definitely not one that I would weigh in lightly into. It’s a slow selling item because it takes a long time to use tea. Locally in WA, there is only a dozen or so retailers that could stock our product successfully, maybe two dozen - and sell it at a level that is profitable for that retailer and useful for them to keep. 

Over east there’s a lot more, obviously. But getting onto shelves internationally is definitely difficult because tea is always viewed as a ‘cheaper’ item, it’s not viewed as a premium product in some parts of the world. For example, in Southeast Asia it’s not, but if you move to locations like China, Hong Kong and Northern India, it is. So choosing the appropriate location that can support a boutique tea brand is quite tough. There’s not a lot of places that can do it. 

I think Cartel & Co’s done it quite well over east, because there’s a bigger population and a lot of options there. In terms of exports, it’s not as easy I don’t think. 

C&C: In that process of getting the products ‘on the shelf’ and going through that evolution, how did you end up working with a distributor and why did you choose to work with Cartel & Co? 

Arjun: Distribution is good if you have a good process and trust between yourself and your distributor. I do trust Hayssam - we’ve been burnt before by distribution and it’s a very tough model to get right. 

For us, it is impossible to manage accounts without representation over east, especially small accounts that are buying a few hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars a month of tea. It’s very hard to chase accounts. It’s also very hard to get representation. So managing of staff is something that I think Cartel & Co does quite well and that sort of representation is what we’re paying for. 

That’s what we’re happy to give a margin for - someone to represent our brand. I feel that Cartel & Co have done a good job of that, they’ve spread the product as well as they can. They’re in a pretty good position right now with our actual output capacity being what it is. I think it’s a good option for us to have that for that side of the country.

C&C: If I was brand new to the XO Tea world, which product would you recommend that I try first? 

Arjun: That is a very difficult question! That’s like saying ‘do you like red wine, white wine, sav blanc, chardonnay, cabernet’? I personally drink a lot of black tea. I drink a lot of Assamese style blended black tea. So The Royal, for example, which is our retail breakfast tea is a blend of three different tea gardens in Assam. I really like the full flavour cup that it produces. I don’t drink milk in my tea, but you can definitely add milk to it. I just like really strong, orthodox black tea. I also drink one of our teas called Julep - a peppermint, spearmint, liquorice tea - because I like sweet things and definitely have got a sweet tooth. That helps to curb that sweet tooth a bit because liquorice is super super sweet in terms of taste. Those are the two I drink the most of, I’d say.

C&C: What do you envision for the future of XO Tea as a brand?

Arjun: We’ve moved heavily online in the last two or three years. I would say that’s our biggest sector now. Every area we’re involved in is growing and we’re going to continue to do that as effectively as we can, but I don’t really have a five year plan. 

I think it’s more of a one to two year plan. We don’t have a business model or structure in that way - I don’t believe that a business like ours really needs it. In the end, it’s a company that imports ingredients, blends them, makes products and sells them. It’s really not more complicated than that. Try to make a living wage, a decent margin, employ a bunch of people, spread the love of tea around the place, get as many people drinking it as you can - there’s no real secret to it, in that sense. It’s like any trading business: buy a product, make a product, sell a product. Try to employ some people. Make people comfortable. There’s not really much more than that. 

So five years from now? I want to still be doing this.

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