How the start-up Teabox reached its 100-countries milestone
When I started Teabox in 2012, from the very first day I knew that the world will be our playground since the teas we deal in have been exported for 100+ years. But the industry was relying on its decades-old system of selling and delivering teas through intermediaries. Nowhere in our Indian tea history has anyone attempted to sell direct from source to consumers worldwide and we wanted to do exactly that — or we had to do exactly that to grow the business.
Our Operations is based out of Siliguri (West Bengal) and we are literally minutes away from the lush tea gardens. But Siliguri as a Tier-III city in India does not have the infrastructure and international connectivity that other cities in India, like Delhi or Mumbai, would have. In addition to the lack of the infrastructure, no one from Siliguri had ever shipped to so many countries worldwide as we aspired to — which meant that we had to learn along the way rather than hire someone to help us.
When we got our first order from USA — from Mr. Williams who bought our Autumn Teas for USD 56 — this was going to be our first experience of sending teas to the USA. Tea is a food product and food products are highly regulated/controlled in many countries with very stringent laws controlling its import into their borders. And USA is one of them. Very soon we figured that we had to be registered with the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to be able to ship our teas into their land. We learned and figured how to do that very quickly. After USA came the UK, Canada, Australia and other developed countries which we cracked easily.
As the volume of orders began to grow, it became near impossible for me as one of two employees at Teabox (other one being an office assistant) to prepare the documentation for every single order along with everything else I was doing. Every shipment out of India required an Invoice, Packing List, AWB copy, Order Copy, Phytosanitary Certificate/Certificate of Origin (depending on the country). This is where we brought in our first process automation with some manual hacks.
We hired a team of freelancers (two street-smart brothers based out of Jaipur) who would receive a copy of the order through an auto forward from my inbox. They started their operations at 6 am in the morning and they had about 3–4 hours to prepare the documentation for every single order before we were in full gear in Siliguri. They would then go ahead to prepare the necessary documentation such as Invoices/Packing List/ AWB copy and save all of them as PDF files in their respective folders on Dropbox. Once the documentation was done, they would then prepare the name labels in the specified format in Excel which I would just print on a gumming sheet. This was the easy part.
The next challenge for us was to not just deliver but deliver it within the timelines promised to the customer (SLA in trade terms). We had to ensure that all promises made to a customer were kept and fulfilled for us to gain his trust. And our goal was not just to serve customers but to delight the customers. Customer delight was the only way for us to grow the business through customer word of mouth (I was running this on bootstrap and had no money to spend on marketing, not yet). That would mean that we had to intimate the customer prior on any delays rather than him reaching out to us once his order did not reach in time. That would mean we had to have an intelligent way of knowing of any delays in advance. Something like crystal grazing. And we had no money and no AI and no smart software. We relied on the only thing which we had: common sense.
I studied the delivery routes of every single courier partner we worked with for major countries such. Patterns started to emerge. For example, an order to USA (NYC) via DHL would follow the below pattern:
Point 1 — Day 0: Order booked & handed over to the courier partner
Point 2 — Day 1 (am): Reaches Kolkata via Darjeeling Mail / Padatik Express (the overnight train from Siliguri)
Point 3 — Day 1 (pm): Transferred from Kolkata to Delhi (via overnight flight)
Point 4 — Day 2 (am): Reaches Delhi
Point 5 — Day 2 (am): Courier sends the package to customs for clearance process
Point 6 — Day 2 (pm): Courier receives the package from customs
Point 7 — Day 2 (pm): Dispatched from Delhi to Leipzig, Germany
Point 8 — Day 3 (am): Arrives at Leipzig, Germany
Point 9 — Day 3 (am): Dispatched from Leipzig, Germany to the hub at Cincinnati, OH in the USA
Point 10 — Day 3 (pm): Arrives at Cincinnati hub, OH
Point 11 — Day 4 (am): Sent for clearance process in Cincinnati hub, OH
Point 12 — Day 4 (pm): Received from clearance process
Point 13 — Day 4 (pm): Transferred from Cincinnati hub, OH to New York hub
Point 14 — Day 5 (am): Sent from New York hub to New York delivery point
Point 15 — Day 5 (am): Out for delivery
Point 16 — Day 5 (am — pm): Delivery to customer
We averaged the time required between each point and thus were able to establish benchmarks. So when the shipment got delayed in connecting from Point 7 to 8 and crossed the benchmark — we would know of it 3 days before the actual delivery day that the shipment would be delayed. Hence, we proactively started informing the customer about the impending delay much before it happened. This helped us manage his expectation — which was the most critical part of the experience. Think about this: Sitting in rural Indiana, he is putting money in an Indian company which he has never dealt with in the past and hence we had to earn his trust. And the best way was through proactive communications and managing expectation. This way we ensured our customers kept coming back to us because of the superior experience.
The next challenge we encountered was shipping to Russia. Russia had been a big tea drinking country from the Soviet Union Times (contrary to people thinking about Vodka being very popular). In fact Russia was our #1 geography in the initial years of Teabox. It presented a huge opportunity for us but also a very BIG challenge. Its customs were notorious and we had no idea if any parcel would be delivered or not. As DHL/Fedex did not operate in Russia — we had to rely on India Post (EMS + Airmail). But that meant few things — that tracking was non-existent or unreliable at best; there were no guarantees for delivery within a certain timeframe. Overall it meant that we were taking a huge gamble for one of our biggest markets.
To fix this we applied the above hack. That helped us to a certain extent but did not help us address the problem in entirety. By then, fortunately, we had grown and had become a much larger company. My colleagues Bharat and Ankit who were tasked with solving this problem. Credit to their effort — we broke down the delivery to Russia in four parts:
We identified partners for each part of the process above, negotiated and ran experiments with them. By identifying the partners with strengths serving their part of the overall journey — we were able to reduce our timelines for delivery from 30 days to as less as 6 days. Wow! That was quite a feat. And the customer only got a single tracking number — as we integrated 4 tracking numbers in our system to show customer only 1. It really was an incredible achievement by our team.
At the heart of this logistical efficiency is a nimble and proactive team that is regularly working with shipping partners and customs departments to remove roadblocks at every step. Again, when Spain and Italy began returning tea and coffee because they were conduits for drugs, we worked on getting our clearances in order. My team was in touch with the Customs in those countries to get our teas through to customers. When orders come from small island countries like Malta, Moldova, or Micronesia we make sure we attach a self-use declaration form so that our customers are spared of extra duty fees. And so, we’ve learned to think of how the make this experience pain-free for the customer, no matter where in the world they live.
Recently, we reached our milestone of 100 countries. As it turns out, we’d been too busy to count but at the end of last year, when we decided to stop and check, we had arrived at 109!
So, as we start a new year, with new goals, new milestones, I’d like to reaffirm my commitment to bringing the freshest teas to customers no matter where in the world you live. And in the shortest time possible.
Kausshal Dugarr is the founder of Teabox / http://www.teabox.com. All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
