Popular Tea Bar in Denver’s Highlands shuttered
Longtime Highlands neighborhood staple Teatulia Tea Bar is closed – another victim of the pandemic – but the popular company’s tea lives on.
“While Teatulia mourns the loss of its single café, the future looks bright,” said CEO Tim Bradley of the 10-year-old Tea Bar.
In an interview Thursday, Bradley said real estate in that neighborhood is getting more expensive by the day, and the Tea Bar couldn’t muster enough sales with the ongoing restrictions on indoor dining.
“We’re definitely a little sad for a lot of reasons,” Bradley said. “But that’s a growing and changing neighborhood there and whoever gets that little slice of retail will be fine there.”
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Turns out a business called MADE Wkshop has taken the space for an “old school shop class MADE modern, fun and social,” said Diane Nagler, founder and CEO.
The corner location at 2900 Zuni is next door to Zuni Street Brewing Co. and across the street from the Academy of Urban Learning.
The Tea Bar was popular with area residents, students and visitors – who loved to take selfies in front of the huge colorful Colorado flag mural made up of recycled tea canisters. But its sales made up less than 1 percent of the private company’s overall sales.
“We liked to joke it was an internet café that also served tea,” he said. “But that real estate lease was not getting any cheaper, and we never managed more than 30 percent of our previous sales with takeout only. We weren’t excellent retailers, but we’re excellent tea makers. The Tea Bar was just a lot of love and effort.”
The bulk of Teatulia’s sales come from online, grocers like King Soopers and Whole Foods, and in workplace sales.
“We saw 17 percent revenue growth last year, despite the pandemic,” Bradley said. “We project 40 percent growth for 2021.”
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Unfortunately, three baristas lost their jobs – with severance to soften the blow, Bradley said. But the Tea Bar manager was able to get another position in the company.
Teatulia has 14 employees and is still headquartered in Denver. It started 12 years ago, with its primary focus on grocery sales. Then it broke into sales at food service businesses, restaurants, universities and colleges. It uses a rare model to source tea as it’s “completely vertically integrated.” Teatulia has its own 3,000 acre tee plantation, called a garden, in Bangladesh. It’s fully organic and Bradley said it pays workers an average of 55 percent more than normal garden tenders in that country.
He said many tea companies source from questionable supply chains, but “we can look at one leaf in our tea and identify which part of the land it came from.”
“It’s sad to say goodbye to Highlands,” he said. “But our business is bubbling.”