When I met Wei Derong again 3 years later, in my feelings, he still maintained the same as 3 years ago: bookish, harmonious, calm, calm, smiling at any time on his face. I asked him, are you doing this? He smiled and said: There may be two reasons, one is that men in their forties and 50s really can't make a big change in appearance, the other may be that they drink too much tea, there is nothing wrong with them, and people may have more spirits...
3 years ago, I was an executive in a well-known tea trading platform, and the main work content of one of the businesses in charge was to integrate the resources of leading tea production and marketing enterprises in major tea producing areas in China, that is, at that time, I recognized Wei Derong and his new tea category - orchid tea.
Before entering the tea industry, Wei Derong worked as a civil servant and coal boss, and worked in the tea wholesale and retail business in Chengdu's Great Southwest Tea City for 8 years around 2000. Like all business people who are proficient in the industry, Wei Derong found that although the gross profit of tea is very high, the real money is still made by brand merchants. During this period, some people in the industry began to try to make orchid tea from tea and orchids as raw materials, and based on his interest in this new tea category, he decided to participate in this direction.
From 2008 to 2009, Wei Derong invested most of the profits earned from doing business in previous years, hired experts from the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Tea Science and Sichuan Agricultural University to set up a working group to develop orchid tea products, and in 2010, he finalized the Shuguo Tianxiang series of tea products, which covered mass consumption tea and high, medium and low price grades, and named it "Shuguo Tianxiang". In order to control the quality of the tea source, he contracted a tea garden in the Mingshan District of Ya'an City; in order to ensure the quality of processing, he customized special machinery and equipment, and purchased a processing plant in the Mingshan District. Wei Derong said, "Shu Kingdom", "Chuan Ye", Sichuan is the ancient Shu Kingdom; "Tianxiang", "Fragrance of the King", orchid incense is the representative of "The Fragrance of the King", noble and elegant. The birth of Tianxiang in the Shu Kingdom not only represents a kind of cognition, but also represents a pursuit of his beloved agricultural cause.
In 2010, when the Shuguo Tianxiang series of teas was just launched, the products were mainly used as tastings in the circle, and the main purpose was to understand the market acceptance. Due to the high cost of making tea, that year, only more than 200 kilograms of dry tea were made, and the result was half given away and half sold, and it was consumed within three months. With the development of market expansion, Wei Derong found that in the orchid tea product market, female customers are the main group. He analyzed that: on the one hand, beautiful things may have a natural attraction to women, just imagine, a transparent glass, a transparent tea soup, a floating leaves, a flower blooming with attractive color, the combination of these beautiful things, what a beautiful picture; on the other hand, this tea is characterized by orchids will float in the tea soup after soaking, the tea leaves float and orchids float, the artistic conception is beautiful, long... In the following years, the sales volume of orchid tea has increased year by year, and the market scope has gradually expanded to Sichuan, Hebei, Shandong, Guangdong, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and other provinces and cities.
A niche tea is recognized by the market, mainly based on the characteristics of the tea. However, as far as the orchid tea market is concerned, there are also many constraints, the most important of which is the supply of raw materials. Wei Derong believes that as far as the market segment of orchid tea is concerned, the space is huge, but there is a shortage of orchid raw materials, and the production capacity of finished tea cannot be fully released. As far as Sichuan is concerned, it is difficult to find large-scale orchid plantations, and even if there are small gardens, the orchid varieties planted are not necessarily suitable for tea making. The main planting bases of domestic orchids are mainly distributed in Sichuan, Yunnan, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Guangdong and other provinces, even if the use of cold chain transportation or air transport, the cost has been high. Therefore, until now, the finished tea can not be measured, can not form a moderate scale can not reduce the cost of tea, which is a real problem. But for the tea category that he has insisted on for so many years, Wei Derong still hopes that more people can know this category and taste this category. In previous years, he had explored cooperation with other agricultural enterprises to set up orchid planting bases, but for various reasons he had not been able to achieve the cooperation goals.
The aroma of wine is also afraid of the deep alley, and good tea must also be promoted, which is a sentence that Wei Derong often chants. In fact, Wei Derong attaches great importance to the promotion of the "Shuguo Tianxiang" brand, and the promotion cost of enterprise expenditure in previous years even reached more than 15% of annual sales, but because it is mostly a traditional promotion channel, after several years, the input and output are not proportional. In the past two years, with the popularity of some live video platforms, he has seen new hope. For the tea industry, he believes that more consideration needs to be given to the development of culture and brand value, and with the improvement of people's living standards, "good tea" and "good tea" will eventually have a conversion process.
Sichuan is the most important tea producing province in China. According to records, around 53 BC, wu Lizhen, the "ancestor of tea", planted seven tea trees on the Mengding Mountain in Ya'an, Sichuan, thus opening the era of artificial tea cultivation. Nowadays, around Mengding Mountain and even extending to the surrounding area of Mount Emei, large-scale tea gardens are one after another, and every tea picking season, wholesalers from all over the country and well-known tea enterprises from many other provinces have to gather in a small county called Mingshan to purchase tea materials, and after returning, they will either sell directly or SELL them again.
Starting in February of this year, Waderong is busy again. In addition to the orchid garden needs to pick flowers, he also has to go to his own tea garden to see, and then it is dry tea, primary processing of orchids, kiln flowers and tea, after multiple processing, it will finally produce tea and orchid marriage products - orchid tea