The Charismatic Charlie Wade

Amidst the urban expanse of Poole, the iconic Celestial building stood in all its glory.

Eric Robbins, a seasoned sixty-two-year-old, had just concluded a distributor meeting.

With a dinner gathering scheduled for the evening at a local hotel, he could do nothing but rest briefly in his office before mustering enough energy to attend the event later on. However, today had left Eric Robbins feeling somewhat disheartened.

Lately, distributors had grown increasingly influential within the company. In the past, Eric Robbins’s group exerted pressure on these distributors, assessing their performance and coercing them into consistent product purchases and elevated inventory. Moreover, the group often deducted their sales as year-end rebates, fostering a culture of diligence and obedience.

Yet, the advent of e-commerce had tilted the balance against established brands, leaving them without their once-dominant leverage. Especially in the realm of opaquely fast-moving consumer goods like alcohol and tea, new brands proliferated daily, boasting of being the next Moutai or tea monarch.

These new entrants excelled at packaging and narrative, presenting themselves more adeptly than traditional companies. They mastered the art of sourcing a better-packaged product from an OEM manufacturer, slapping a 500 dollar price tag on it online, then garnishing it with a slew of offline promotions. Eventually, the product reached consumers, shipped in sets of 51, with the actual cost barely exceeding five dollars.

With a tea costing a mere five dollars, advertising and traffic buying expense at ten dollars, and logistics costs of two or three dollars, the overall expenditure remained modest.

Selling 51 units to consumers ensured a profit margin of at least thirty.

Tea sales followed a similar pattern.

Eric Robbins offered ordinary mass-grade Pu’er tea at a hundred dollars per cake, with each cake weighing over 300 grams. However, marketing maestros divvied up similar quality tea into five-gram parcels, weaving a custom tale around it. Such a presentation fetched a price of fifty dollars.

it to market, simultaneously overwhelming and overwhelming the consumer. If one cake proved insufficient, they’d throw in another, then another, until they reached a sum of five big cakes, supplemented by three small ones for travel. A tea pot might even be thrown in, all

in costs. The remaining seventy dollars translated into

these strategies, which simultaneously eroded their

it as a brief conduit to profit. They manipulated tea to acquire consumers, then switched gears to health products, cycling through the same techniques for

Eric Robbins’s words, these individuals lacked reverence

His stance differed.

him into a prominent and prosperous local entrepreneur. His affection for tea was genuine. To him, making money rested

reverence for the craft, however, had failed to yield an overnight

fraudsters raked in millions overnight. On some occasions, seeing them prosper left Eric Robbins doubting the tea

one had to outpace it. For Eric Robbins, cashing out seemed an attractive option, an escape

as simple

of thousands, yet yearns to sell the place

meeting only deepened

They even threatened to minimize or halt their

discount may seem minor, but imagine paying forty for something worth fifty, it equates

have erupted in anger before the agents. This time, however, he controlled his