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.

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 for the grand price

to roughly twenty dollars in costs. The remaining seventy

these strategies, which simultaneously

understanding or appreciation for tea; they simply saw it as a brief conduit to profit. They manipulated tea to acquire consumers, then switched gears

Robbins’s words, these

His stance differed.

prosperous local entrepreneur. His affection for tea was genuine. To him, making money rested upon the foundation of crafting excellent tea.

and reverence for the craft, however, had failed to

prosper left Eric Robbins doubting the tea industry’s future. He feared most sectors would fall prey to bad money

avoid becoming bad money, one had to outpace it. For Eric Robbins, cashing

cashing out wasn’t as

yet yearns to sell the place

only deepened Eric Robbins’s

original 50% to 40%. They even threatened to minimize or halt their purchases altogether

seem minor, but imagine paying forty for something worth fifty,

Robbins would have erupted in anger before the agents. This time, however, he controlled his temper, promising the distributors he’d earnestly deliberate