Tea Company Parlays Century-Long History Into D2C eCommerce Following

In the competitive D2C space, Mark Wendell Tea has found history makes all the difference.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Hartley E. Johnson, co-owner of the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company, explained that the business has been selling direct to consumer (D2C) via catalogs and mail-in checks for nearly 120 years and that it has had an eCommerce business since the late 1990s, right around when Johnson joined the company. This longstanding history has proven a competitive advantage even in the crowded eCommerce world.

“There’s a lot of different tea websites out there and they can range from anybody that’s starting their own little business, like mom-and-pop shops, to huge companies that are at the forefront of global eCommerce, and a lot of in between as well,” Johnson said. “For us, a lot of our repeat customers through our website are due to the fact that we have been a long-standing company, so we have generational customers.”

He noted that a portion of the company’s customers are familiar with the brand from seeing it in their grandparents’ or other relatives’ pantries. Now, 80% to 90% of its consumer sales are made via its eCommerce channels, enabling the business to grow “astronomically.”

Certainly, the eCommerce food and beverage audience has grown. Data from PYMNTS’ study “Changes in Grocery Shopping Habits and Perception,” which draws from a December survey of more than 2,400 U.S. consumers, finds that nearly half the population (46%) purchases at least some of their groceries online. The report also notes that 7% of consumers shop for groceries exclusively via eCommerce channels, a share that has increased 36-fold since before the pandemic.

With this rise has come an increase in businesses looking to garner an online following, able to do so without the often-prohibitive cost of opening a brick-and-mortar store. Consequently, even a century-old firm must engage with loyalty-building strategies or else risk falling by the wayside. The Mark T. Wendell Tea Company, for its part, has a program that offers a small discount on orders $50 and up as well as other exclusive samples and discounts.

“We do a lot of in-house emails,” Johnson noted. “We definitely get a return on things when we have some sort of a promotion or discount. People are always looking for just a little bit off here and there. … We get a lot of people that are they're engaged with that and they’re happy to see some sort of a return from frequent buying.”

One of the key strategies for driving long-term loyalty in eCommerce has been the subscription model, offering consumers lower prices if they purchase on a regular basis. However, Johnson noted that, when the company has looked into it in recent years, inventory challenges have proven too prohibitive to guarantee the regular availability of certain items.

“It could be something going forward that we look back into,” Johnson said. “We just definitely need the supply chain to stabilize. It’s getting there but it’s definitely not back to pre-COVID levels.”