Former American financial consultant started with Chai
From the traditional drink at home
Not the spicy, sugary Americanized version. In India, “chai” simply means “tea” – and after immigrating from Punjab (India) to Atlanta (USA) at the age of nine, Sunny and her parents made tea together. They mix spices like ginger and cumin, boil it with milk or water on the stove and filter it into a drink
Monica Sunny, 48, started The Chai Box in 2016.
As an adult, Sunny has enjoyed a very successful career, becoming a “personal performance” consultant for companies such as Accenture, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. She is also married, has three sons, and teaches them how to make “bottles”.
“The bottle is what connects me to India, to my culture,” says Sunny, 48. “I want to pass that on to my boys.”
When Sunny made “bottles” for her sons’ snacks, another mother asked why she didn’t sell it. So at the end of 2016 she started a side business, launching a website called The Chai Box in her basement. She offers brewed teas, mainly selling packs of various flavors.
In the following years, business activity was quite slow. However, by 2021, The Chai Box has been named to the list of the most loved things of 2021 by Oprah, the famous female MC of the United States. This is a historic milestone for Sunny’s family business.
Sales skyrocketed immediately. In September and October 2021, the company had just over $93,000 in revenue. By November and December, however, that number had grown to $377,000, according to estimates by CNBC Make It.
And that monthly sales are maintaining until now. But The Bottle Box isn’t just an overnight phenomenon. To get that breakthrough, Sunny and her business have accumulated for many years.
On the journey to create a breakthrough
Sunny said that for the first two years, she operated The Chai Box not according to a certain strategy, fulfilling orders every two weeks. She also started posting “meditation tea” on Instagram — a 20-minute morning process of making “chai” in the kitchen.
In 2019, Sunny struck deals to sell concentrated tea at local coffee shops near her home in Atlanta. In 2020, she rented a booth at AmericasMart, a local gift trade show. There, she sold tea in various flavors —for example, the “True Blend” multi-flavored tea, which includes orange pekoe, assam, and Darjeeling (names of tea-growing regions in India). The tea has received the support of many new customers.
Despite the increase in sales, Sunny kept her full-time consulting job. Then, in March 2020, Covid broke out. Sunny and her husband gave up their current job. She continued to post “meditation teas” for sale, and to her surprise, Instagram users started following. A lot of them bought this product.
It was The Chai Box’s first big break.
Maintain The Chai Box’s original mission and goals
Sunny said the goal of creating The Chai Box was to popularize organic Indian food in a “sustainable and ethical way”. “I want to teach people about a drink that is not only very meaningful to our culture, but helps people as well,” she says: “Not everyone knows that these ingredients very good for diseases such as inflammation, digestion and blood circulation.”
Her father-in-law lives in Kerala, India, an area known for producing all kinds of ingredients, so she and her husband went there to sample potential ingredients and meet local farmers. Currently, The Chai Box — has up to 7 full-time employees, including Sunny and her husband and 20 part-time employees —works directly with some of the farmers.
As business flourished, the company expanded, moving into a 4,000-square-foot manufacturing facility near home in February 2021. Just a few months later, one of Oprah Winfrey’s assistants reached out to Sunny, asking The Bottle Box to submit a sample to join Oprah’s Favorite Things list.
At first, Sunny thought something was wrong. But Winfrey’s team had apparently heard about The Chai Box through one of Sunny’s facilities, AmericasMart, and had seen Sunny’s Instagram meditations.
Sunny and family celebrate The Chai Box being selected to Oprah’s Favorite Things list. Sunny said that she had dreamed of making “bottles” for Winfrey since she was a child.
In August, The Chai Box was announced to be shortlisted. Winfrey’s team helped Sunny start selling boxes of tea on Amazon and arranged for the product to be featured on “Good Morning America” by ABC. Sunny said the show’s producers had forecast sales to increase to around 3,200 packs of the mixed tea. And it didn’t stop there, the tea packs were sold out within 7 hours.
After that, everything went extremely smoothly. Over the past four months, The Chai Box has sold over 20,000 tea packs in total – quadrupling its monthly sales. Mixed tea packets are even slated to appear at the Oscars on March 27 and the Grammy Awards on April 3.
But Sunny insists her unexpected charm —and Hollywood charm —didn’t deviate from her original mission.
“It’s been a joy to have my whole family work together and see how the ‘bottle’ ties people together,” she said.
(According to CNBC)
By Business and Marketing
at Blogtuan.info – Source: cafebiz.vn – Read the original article here
