Dachi Tea Co. Launch Their Crowd funding Campaign From Across the Globe Using Microsoft OneDrive (Guest Blog)
My business partner, Nicholas, and I have searched across the mystical island of Taiwan to rediscover the true art of tea making. We found the perfect tea garden, forged friendships with talented tea craftsmen, and now we’re heading back into the remote reaches of the island to make tea after successfully reaching our Kickstarter funding target of $15,000USD in less than 15 days.
But first, we have 10 more days to meet our stretch goal of $30,000 that will enable us to bring our tea set, custom-designed by one of Taiwan’s finest ceramic artists, to market.
Brand Story
Having lived in Taiwan for three years, Nick and I first bonded while sharing cups of tea after our Chinese language evening classes – a recurring pastime which soon turned into an important ritual. At the time Nick was working on the construction of luxury hotels and I was working on an art and culture publication, not too long before having left a career as a Maths and Philosophy secondary school teacher.
The coming together of Nick’s passion for all things quality and gourmet and my appreciation for the abstract and pursuing a life full of meaning has led to the creation of a tea company that pursues the finest quality tea leaves, and an agenda to communicate a valuable message: to live deliberately yet courageously.
Our Challenges
The nomadic nature of the lifestyles we have chosen to live means that getting access to traditional funding has proven difficult, so we have used our hard-earned personal savings and bootstrapped our way through a crowd funding campaign. This campaign is the first phase of us fulfilling our dreams of building lean lives and careers that are full of adventure and mobility. In these dreams, freedom and independence shall be the currencies that make us millionaires
From day one, we have been focused on building a remote-working team that can communicate effortlessly and collaborate from all around the world, and for this this we have turned to Microsoft OneDrive.
Dachi Tea Co.’s crowd funding campaign came with a unique set of challenges, since we had to tell our story from inspiration to execution, as well as staying true to the brand ethos, which is to pay homage to the culture from which we are borrowing and shine light upon the array of personalities that touch our products. What’s more, given that we are introducing a relatively sophisticated product into immature markets, we had to first educate our audience on our teas in order to communicate the intricacies that make our inaugural collection special. To hit all of these points, we had just 3 minutes of the Kickstarter community’s attention.
Considering we were 6 hours away from the city and our budget was limited to just 2 days of shooting in the mountains, having a platform like OneDrive that allowed us to upload unlimited data, and share it and discuss it effortlessly made the project a success. Receiving feedback and creative direction from our design-focused friends from the city meant that we could review each day of shooting upon returning to our hostel and set a focused agenda for the next day.
One of our campaign teaser videos was shot and uploaded before noon from the central mountain ranges of Taiwan, shared with a composer in Taipei for sound, and in the hands of our art director for colouring and the superimposition of graphics before his lunch time in Belgium. The video was ready for feedback, editing and then posting within 24 hours.
The Future, And OneDrive
As a new lifestyle brand trying to break into the ultra competitive tea and gourmet food market, we are trying to target the digitally savvy and socially active online market to fulfil our mission of helping people get centred through the ritual of tea drinking, reminding us of the intimate relationship we all share with nature.
To get ahead of the pack, we have built an in-house team to create and curate compelling digital content to educate consumers on the world of tea and natural products, while trying to share the element of Taiwan wanderlust that can make our teas seem like the souvenir from the vacation that our customers are yet to take.
In order to execute this strategy, we are going to need a platform for safe storage and seamless communication that effectively enables creative collaboration across time zones.
We can assuredly say that Microsoft have helped us, as young entrepreneurs, achieve some early business success and build the kind of careers that many believe people only blog about, but rarely actually do.
For more information, please reach out to us:
Official Website: www.dachitea.co
Kickstarter Page: https://goo.gl/czWdHR
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DachiTeaCo
Thanks, Simon
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