Gourmet-Tea Entrepreneur Steeped in His Work

Mix an intense peach extract with chunky leaves of tea and you get Stoopid Love, a smooth, fruity brew packaged in a cardboard matchbox.

Add one 31-year-old chief executive, a large dollop of marketing savvy and a bunch of energetic teenage employees, and you get Steep Co., the Connecticut company that makes Stoopid Love and 23 other gourmet teas.

Jeff Piazza launched Steep in 1995, hoping to catch a wave from the booming coffeehouse culture. Today, he sells his brews to coffee shops and restaurants around the country, rounding out his client list with big-name places like MTV and the trendy Manhattan bistro Balthazar.

His base of operations: a no-frills shop in a suburban strip mall. A sign from the previous tenant, Village Travel, still hangs above the door. Rag dolls made of tea bags hang ghoulishly in the window. Music, ranging from Broadway tunes to alternative rock to swing, blares from a CD player.

“Some of our clients would die if they saw this,” Piazza said with a grin.

Piazza’s entry into entrepreneurship was nearly as haphazard as his surroundings. In the early 1990s, with an English degree from Wesleyan University and no real career goals, Piazza was biding time in an insurance company’s management-training program.

“It was OK,” he said. “The pay was good, and it wasn’t very hard. But it certainly wasn’t creative.”

He kept his day job but enrolled in classes at New York’s School of Visual Arts. And then he fell in love.

Like many a twentysomething, Piazza wooed Karen Norton over the course of long road trips, with good music in the tape deck and frequent stops at coffeehouses, which were popping up all over the country.

As they watched teenagers, wired young professionals and sleep-deprived parents shelling out several dollars a pop for fancy coffee, they began to toy with the idea of starting a business themselves. And Piazza, who preferred tea, wondered if it could possibly catch on as coffee had.

He and Norton began going to trade shows to meet with wholesalers and suppliers. They wrote surveys and placed them in coffee shops, querying customers about their favorite beverages.

Ultimately, Piazza determined that although most people liked the taste of tea, young Americans linked it with England, or with their parents. So he set out to create a tea that a hip, young coffeehouse denizen would be proud to order.

First, the blend. He ordered ingredients from a German wholesaler. “We went to visit them, and they were real cool folks,” he said. “So I hired them.”

Aside from the “cool folks” factor, they made whole-leaf tea, while most tea companies chop the tea ingredients into tiny pieces called fannings. “It’s the difference between steak and hamburger,” Piazza said.

Then, the package. Since the whole-leaf tea, with its flowers and twigs, didn’t fit properly into a flat tea bag, Piazza found a New York company that wrapped tea in tiny round balls. The balls, of course, didn’t fit into a typical paper tea envelope. So Piazza designed tiny cardboard matchboxes, each imprinted with a stylized “S.”

“I wanted it to be cool,” he said. “I mean, I’d been drinking tea out of a box with little teddy bears on it for years, and that’s a little weird.”

Next, the names. Darjeeling and Earl Grey may be exotic, but Piazza wanted quirky. So he christened mint tea Urban Catnip. A mellow vanilla green tea became Corduroy Hips. And he named a berry blend Josie’s Heart, in honor of his mother.

The crowning touch: Each tea got its own loopy slogan imprinted on the box. Soogar Dreams, a chamomile tea, offers this gentle wish: “Say good-night, Sleepyhead. Close them big brown eyes and I’ll close mine.”

When the tea was made, Piazza hit the road again, this time with friend Damion Silver. They crammed boxes in their car and showed up unannounced at 400 coffeehouses between Connecticut and California. His sales pitch, he admits, was hopelessly unpolished.

“I basically said, ‘I have this really good tea. Do you want to buy it?’ ”

Plenty of places said no. Some were content with their existing teas; others were reluctant to deal with a vendor with no track record, Piazza recalls. But eventually, they sold their entire supply and returned to Connecticut with a profit of $800 and a solid list of clients. It was enough to convince Piazza he could make a go of it.

In its first full year, Steep sold 5,000 boxes of tea, at $12 retail and $7.50 wholesale. Last year, the company sold 5,000 boxes each week. Sales are growing thanks to a Web site, https://www.steep.com, and a steady push into chichi places like the Armani Exchange store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Steep provided the tea for the store’s 1998 opening.

Piazza said small, independent coffeehouses remain his target customers, and most of his higher-end clients have come to him through recommendations.

Piazza has also plugged his tea in magazines as diverse as ‘Teen (which exulted, “What a hip sip!”), Vegetarian Times and InStyle. But the media have gotten him in trouble, too.

In August, a Hartford television station did a story on Steep, which was then operating out of Piazza’s Glastonbury home. The next morning, the town’s zoning board showed up at Steep, warning Piazza he couldn’t run the business out of his home. That’s why Steep is now housed in a strip mall, and why one of Piazza’s goals for 1999 is to “observe and follow rules and regulations.”

Piazza works at all hours, fueled on four or five hours of sleep a night and plenty of caffeine. Some days, he said, exhaustion sets in.

“But then I get these little fixes,” he said. A big new order, a glossy magazine story, even a tasty new flavor can spur him on to the next challenge.