Jun 17, 2009

Daycare Owner Rocks Two-Month-Old Tea StoreBy Heidi KyserWorldTeaNews.com

With his Steamboat Springs, Colo., daycare up and running and his daughter soon heading to kindergarten, Josh Bodden began thinking about what to do next. In deciding, he looked both back to his upbringing and forward to a business model that was new to him.

Bodden was raised in the south, so he grew up drinking iced tea. In a family of German ancestry, his mother and aunt also introduced him to hot tea when he was a kid.

So when he tried some specialty hot tea in a health food store a few years ago, it wasn’t a completely foreign concept – but it was different.

“I remember the first one I had was an Assam,” Bodden said. “I just thought it was so much better. After that, I started looking into it more and more, and discovered the whole world of specialty tea.”

Since then, Bodden has tried many teas (his current favorites are Japanese greens). The passion led him to the New Business Boot Camp at the 2008 World Tea Expo (which is owned by the same company that owns World Tea News).

He had been toying with the idea of starting a tea business since the year before, but the conference helped him refine the concept, nail down his business plan and financing, and find the vendors he needed to get started, Bodden said.

He decided to go with a retail store model, rather than a café – coincidentally, for the exact opposite reason that the owner of our last profiled tea room went with the café model: Bodden wanted to avoid the frantic pace of food service.

“My brother owned a restaurant, and I didn’t want to do that after seeing him do it,” he said. “For a while, I thought that if opening a tea business was what I wanted to do, I had to go with that business model. After the New business Boot Camp, I realized that maybe I didn’t have to go that way.”

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