We had to make a painful decision earlier this month. When we started 8 years ago there were a lot of things we had our hearts set on that weren’t normally done in the beverage industry – in fact, our glass supplier (we still work with the same salesman after all these years) and I still laugh about it.

We wanted to start with rectangular bottles (still hasn’t happened)
We wanted messages under the caps (happened 2 years into the business)
We wanted to brew our tea with real tea leaves and spring water instead of concentrate or powder
We wanted to use organic honey or sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup

I remember in one meeting the manager of a bottling plant asked me whether we wanted to pack our tea 25 bottles to the case instead of the customary 24. I asked him, “Why would we want to do that?” and he replied, “Because we don’t do that either!”

One other thing we insisted on was putting on a front and back label on the bottles. We believed that this kind of label treatment accomplished several important things:

It let the customer see that we weren’t trying to hide anything – the right message for an “Honest” product
It helped convey the “wine-like” gourmet quality of the product we were making, especially important since our tea is packed in a standard juice bottle
It created a distinctive presence on the shelf

But of course we couldn’t find a bottling plant that was capable of putting on the front and back label. Rather than give in to convention and use a wraparound label like everyone else, we decided to pack our bottles in Buffalo with no labels on them. Then we loaded the unlabeled bottles onto a truck, shipped them to a warehouse outside of Philadelphia where the bottles were run through a shampoo bottle labeling line, then repacked into cases (using a hair dryer to seal the shrink wrap), and shipped out from there. It was pretty much a disaster – ridiculously expensive, and that’s not even including the time the labeling folks put Assam back labels on Moroccan Mint bottles!! But as foolish as this strategy was, it enabled us to launch Honest Tea the way we wanted to, and after all, as a cash-starved start-up, the bottles were the only way to communicate what we were about.

About a year after we launched, we found a way to apply the labels to the bottles on the bottling line and ever since then we’ve continued with the front and back labels for our glass line. That is until now. Last month our front and back labeler died – and yet as many of our customers know, that labeler was limping along for quite a few years – our labels were often wrinkly, crooked or bubbly – not worthy of the high-quality product inside. So when our labeler crashed and we considered the $250,000 cost for a new labeler, we instead decided to look at other options. After a great deal of redesign work and even more personal angst, we finally came up with a look for a wraparound label that we think is consistent with our brand’s look. Because this is such a busy time of year, the new labels will start appearing on shelves on the East Coast later this month. The West Coast labeler is still hanging in there so it may be some time before wraparound labels start appearing out there.

We still have rolls of our original labels from the shampoo bottle in our office – we keep them right by the door – partially to remind everyone of our humble-and-not-always-rational beginnings, but also because they’re fun to stick on people who walk in.

Keep your eyes out for the new labels, and you may want to save the front and back ones – they’ll soon become collectors’ items. Honestly yours, Seth

It was refreshing to see that the American Beverage Association, in partnership with President Clinton’s Foundation and the American Heart Association, has agreed to withdraw sodas and most sugary drinks from schools. That’s something that Honest Tea has supported for some time, and a battle I had to fight along with some other parents in my son’s elementary school when a soda vending machine was installed. I remember some school officials and even some parents resenting our efforts to get rid of the machine but today’s action helps confirm that we weren’t a bunch of extremists – it was common sense. I can’t say I agree with the decision to leave in diet drinks, but today’s action is a positive start, and one that came without government intervention, which is always a good thing.

In the winter of 1988, I traveled on my own to Hunan, a province in Central China that was fairly remote to Westerners at the time. I had been traveling on the train with some American friends, but when I disembarked at 1 a.m. I was all alone – in a place where tens of millions of people around me didn’t know me. As I tried to navigate my way through the crowd, an instant of panic set in – I realized that if I disappeared here, people might not even realize it. I did my best to block that thought out of my head and eventually found my way to a hotel, and ended up having a wonderful time in a province that 10 years later would be a source for much of the green tea that Honest Tea purchases. (The only low note was on the last night in Hunan when I unwittingly ate dog for dinner.)

Sometimes launching Honest Tea in a new city can feel a bit that way – practically no one knows about us and if Honest Tea disappeared, most people might not even notice. Fortunately, we are developing sales partners (distributors and brokers) who can help introduce our products to the right stores. We don’t always succeed – sometimes there are places where there isn’t as much of an appetite for organics or less-sweet drinks, but these days it certainly seems like more retailers and consumers are taking an interest in the kind of things we’re selling. In fact, April was a record sales month for Honest Tea – we sold more last month than we did our entire first year in business.

April and May are certainly the most exhilarating months in the beverage business. As the weather starts to get warmer, stores and distributors make decisions about what kind of drinks they will carry for the warmer months ahead. As a result, our little band of salespeople have to try to be everywhere at once. We spend most of our time traveling around the country bringing Honest Tea to cities and stores where most people have never heard of Honest Tea. We may not always speak the same way, or be able to navigate well in unfamiliar cities, but Honest Tea is being welcomed by all kind of new distributors – whether they carry beer, soda, or tofu, and the dogs can sleep peacefully.

This past weekend my sister and I took one of my sons to visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In addition to enjoying the cafeteria’s extensive First Nation Peppermint display, we were struck by how closely America’s indigenous peoples molded their lives and culture to the natural environments around them. For example, the annual calendar of the Inuit of Western Alaska is defined by the life cycles of the bowhead whales. On a day to day basis they have very little concept of time since the sun shines 24 hours a day from May 19 until the end of August.
I was struck by the contrast between the way the Inuit mold their lives to the earth and the efforts our society makes to mold the earth to our will. Yet as hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia or the earthquake in Pakistan tragically showed, earth has a will of its own.
Conventional tea production also seeks to mold nature to its will through chemical pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers. Yet reducing natural risks of one kind creates risks of a different kind. With conventional agriculture the soil is less robust, there is less diversity of plant and animal life, and consequently less resistance to disease or other threats. And of course, all those chemicals eventually go into the ecosystem and the bodies of the people picking and drinking the tea.
Organic agriculture, on the other hand, requires that the farmer and the land be in harmony . Ladybugs, not chemical pesticides, control mites and aphids. Natural composting and mulch help develop soil and terrain that is rich and robust, benefiting all surrounding life.
When my family visited the tea gardens in Darjeeling, India this past spring we were surprised, if not alarmed, to see a scorpion in the shower. Our host, Rajah, showed us a different scorpion that had a permanent home in the corner of his bathroom. While most people’s “natural” instinct would be to remove a poisonous animal from their bathroom, Rajah pointed out that the scorpion doesn’t bother him and he doesn’t bother it. They coexist, maybe not in harmony, but at least in balance.
Nature doesn’t need our help, it just needs to be. We need to find more ways to live in harmony with nature rather than in spite of it. In the long run, we have no choice.  In 2006 may we all bring more change to the ways things are done and harmony to the way we live.