Semar Tea
Founder · 2020–2021
Built a premium saffron tea brand during COVID lockdown. 15 product iterations. Killed it before launch. Worth it for the process.
What I Learned
- You can learn the full mechanics of an ecommerce business without ever going to market. That was the point, and it worked.
- Quality is the wrong bar if you don't genuinely believe in the category. I don't drink tea. That mattered more than I expected.
- Fifteen iterations with a herbalist teaches you something about what 'good enough' actually means when the standard is yours alone to set.
It was March 2020, I had COVID lockdown time and an MBA starting in a few months, and I wanted to learn how ecommerce actually works -- not from a case study, but from first principles. So I decided to build a product.
The criteria I set for myself: low cost to produce, easily personalised, small and cheap to store and ship. Tea hit all three. I settled on saffron tea specifically -- premium positioning, a distinct identity, a product I could genuinely differentiate.
What followed was fifteen rounds of development with a herbalist and a wholesale tea provider. Blend adjustments. Packaging iterations. Pricing modelling. I worked through the full stack -- supplier sourcing, unit economics, brand identity, fulfilment logistics, the mechanics of building a Shopify store from scratch. I learned what I came to learn.
The honest reason I killed it before launch was simple: I don't drink tea. That sounds ridiculous, but it meant I had no personal reference point for "good." I was trying to justify a 100% price premium over market-rate saffron tea, and I couldn't get the product to a quality level I was confident warranted it -- partly because I couldn't taste the gap clearly enough to close it.
I shut it down cleanly, before any customers, before any sunk cost beyond the development work. Negative outcome in the commercial sense. But I came out the other side knowing how to build an ecommerce product end-to-end. That was always the actual goal.