Tan Qiong's Pivot: Standardizing China's Non-Standard Tea for the Masses
Jacky Zhang
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7-15Mia: It's always fascinating how some of the biggest career pivots come from projects that, on the surface, completely fail. It's like a dead end that secretly opens a door.
Mars: Absolutely. It's often in figuring out why something *doesn't* work that you find the real opportunity. A perfect example of this is the story of Tan Qiong.
Mia: Right, let's set the stage for her journey. After graduating in marketing, she built a career in real estate, aviation, and then finance. By age 35, she'd built a payment gateway business to 500 million RMB a year. Then, in 2012, a client asked her to research a B2B tea trading platform. This led to a four-month deep dive into the market which, despite concluding the platform wasn't viable, sparked her vision for her own tea brand.
Mars: You know, that's such a critical moment. Most people would just write up the report, say it's not feasible, and move on. But she saw the negative result not as a failure, but as a treasure map pointing to a different kind of prize. That deep dive gave her an education no business school could offer.
Mia: Exactly, that foundational research was key. So, what specific market insights did she glean from that intensive investigation that made her believe a tea brand was the way to go, especially when a B2B platform seemed unworkable?
Mars: Well, it all came down to a core insight she developed about the market's structure.
Mia: Tan Qiong's research revealed this unique three-stage non-standard nature of the Chinese tea market. This means products at the origin are inherently variable due to manual processes, wholesale prices can fluctuate wildly with things like collectible value, and even consumer-level pricing is inconsistent. She also realized that even with tea's ancient history, its commercialization was really young, with very few big brands. The key was finding a huge gap for simple, everyday teas, since most products were either for gifting or required a high level of expertise to appreciate.
Mars: That three-stage non-standard concept is the perfect explanation. It immediately shows you why a rigid B2B platform, which needs predictable, standardized units to trade, would just fall apart. But for a brand, that chaos is an opportunity. If you can be the one to create consistency and clarity, you instantly stand out.
Mia: Absolutely. These insights were clearly the bedrock of her strategy. So, armed with this understanding of the market's complexities and unmet needs, how did she decide to approach building a brand, and what was the core consumer segmentation strategy that guided her?
Mars: This is where it gets really clever. She went straight for the numbers.
Mia: Tan Qiong's brand, which she named CHALI, was built on a crucial piece of consumer segmentation. She found that a staggering 92% of tea drinkers, who she called Level 0 consumers, see tea simply as flavored water. They're looking for basic things like health, refreshment, and taste. The other 8% are the connoisseurs. So CHALI's strategy was to target that massive 92% majority, and to do that in a non-standard industry, they looked to an outsider for inspiration: Lipton.
Mars: That is a classic market disruption play. It's about taking a complex, almost intimidating product and making it simple, accessible, and enjoyable for the masses. It’s a playbook we've seen succeed in so many other industries.
Mia: What's really striking here is the sheer scale of that 92%. In an industry that so often celebrates the expert and the niche, to just say No, we're for everyone else is a fundamental redefinition of the market. It's basically democratizing tea.
Mars: Exactly. And choosing Lipton as a benchmark is brilliant. Lipton mastered taking a traditional product and creating a consistent, reliable experience for a global audience. It proved standardization was possible. The genius of CHALI was applying that modern, mass-market thinking to the incredibly artisanal and non-standard world of Chinese tea.
Mia: That deep dive into the 92% and the Lipton benchmark really clarifies CHALI's ambitious vision. It's clear that Tan Qiong's journey from finance to tea was driven by sharp, actionable insights.
Mars: It really was. To boil it down, she pivoted from a successful finance career after a failed research project revealed a huge opportunity. She identified that the market's non-standard nature was a barrier for trading platforms but a massive opening for a consumer brand. She saw that the mainstream consumer just wanted simple, accessible tea—basically, flavored water. And finally, her entire strategy was built on targeting that overlooked 92% of the market, using a global giant like Lipton as the blueprint for how to standardize China's non-standard tea for the masses.