The Sydney Tea Festival

Now all the dust has settled…

I was planning on posting this right after the Festival. However, there was so much stuff happening … but, oh well, better late than never right?

Let’s start by saying what a day! This was our first Tea Festival, but also our first public stall for Shoshin Matcha. We didn’t know what to expect as a stall holder as we have only been to the Tea Festival as a festival-goer. That being said, we knew it would be busy!

So many things had to come together to make this work and I want to write about a few of them. 

We wanted to make our stall unique and fit our brand while also aligning with our environmental mission,

so we didn’t want to use one-time things; we wanted everything to be reusable.

What started out as an idea for a unique stand quickly turned into a phone call to my Dad followed shortly by us building it! Why pay someone when you can build it yourself?

A quick trip to Bunnings (I lie, more like a long trip for hours figuring out what to get to make this stand) for supplies and we were off - but not before grabbing a Bunnings Sausage Sanga (A MUST!).

Looking for a colour that represented the earth + Australia in all its beauty we settled on this.

My dad has been building things all his life and still does till this day, lucky for me he has passed on a little knowledge over the years which allowed me to be get involved rather than just spectate. We ended up after day one with something that closely resembled our stand at the festival. Dad wanted to make sure it was built well so the stand is heavy and durable!

Then, after day two (two days before the actual festival day),

we finished painting. We also had to paint all the little things for the benches to make everything look the same red earth colour.

The night before it was all hands on deck.

The stand is quite big and we had a lot of stuff so both my parents came out to help us set up the night before. It took a few hours to put the stand together and set up everything. However, once it came together it looked exactly how we wanted it, well not exactly as it was better!

The people we want to thank…

First of all, thanks to Sydney tea festival for having us at your awesome event! We will definitely be coming back next year! A Massive thanks to my Dad as this would have never come together without him, (I don’t think my dad understands what a blog is so I’ll have to screenshot this and send to him). Thanks to my Mum! She also helped out a lot. Lastly, I want to thank two of my best mates - Tomas and Daniel. Not only did they spend a lot of time before the festival learning about matcha, us and our mission, they also gave up their Sunday to help us out and made the stand a success! They say you know your true friends when you start a business and ask for some help from friends. Definitely true!

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by our stand and tried our matcha.

For those who bought our products at the festival - we have planted over 800 trees across Mozambique, Haiti, Madagascar, Nepal and Indonesia just from that one days’ effort! We couldn’t have done it without you! We have now planted over 5000 trees in total. Still a fair way off our goal of millions but it’s an amazing start!

This was our first festival but definitely not our last. See you next year!

Credit for these last photos goes to Madeye Photography

John & Sabs