Luke Pearce: Radical Tea Towels in American Homes
Today we meet with Luke Pearce, the co-founder of Radical Tea Towel, a company that makes political and social statements for the home. He talks with us about how his company came into fruition and how it operates now.
Keeping the manufacturing process in England, keeping quality control high and being part of a niche market made the company very successful. And after having tea towel success in England, Luke decided to bring the company across to do business in America too.
With a different continent come different challenges, and Luke was surprised to find out he even had to explain what a tea towel was to a lot of Americans. But each problem he overcame and here, he tells us exactly how.
He also shares some solid advice for anyone who’s thinking of making the move across the pond...
“Other people’s problems represent great business solutions. This is where business can step in and help people out.”
Time Stamps:
00:32 - What Radical Tea Towels are.
01:19 - Where the idea for Radical Tea Towels came from.
03:18 - The importance of having a niche product.
04:18 - How successful Radical Tea Towels are.
04:56 - Local manufacturing and importing materials.
06:24 - Why Luke moved to America, and what made it both easy and hard.
10:32 - How the logistics change when selling products in America.
12:34 - The beliefs behind Lukes company and the different politics in America.
16:25 - Where Luke sells (and doesn’t sell) his product and why.
19:58 - Who Luke’s customer demographic is.
22:06 - Lukes advice for people thinking of moving their business to America.
23:45 - How to not get overwhelmed by America’s different complex policies.
24:46 - The benefits of operating in Philadelphia.
25:58 - Networking in the US.
27:18 - The initial feedback Luke received about his tea towels.
Resources:
https://radicalteatowel.co.uk
www.mtbonnell.com
Connect with Luke Pearce: LinkedIn
Email us at - Info@mtbonnell.com
Twitter - @mtbonnell
Connect with Sebastian Sauerborn: Linkedin
Episode Transcript
My name is Luke Pearce and I’m a cofounder of Radical Tea Towel.
Nas: We are here with this week’s guest and a lot of tea towels on our table, so I’m seeing one with an image of Malcolm X and a quote saying “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” we’ve also got a tea towel with Rosa Parks, “People always said I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true, no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in”. Okay, so we’ve got these tea towels and they’ve got all these radical messages on them. Tell us a little bit about that.
Luke: So, we take historic designs and we make designs of our own which are inspired by political history in some way, inspiring movements, great thinkers of the past, from philosophers to political campaigners, to radicals through the ages who tried to make the world a better place and we put these designs on everyday items, starting with the humble English tea towel, but we also sell mugs and fridge magnets and aprons and whole bunch of other everyday items that people might use in their home.
Sebastian: And how did this came about Luke, it’s a great idea and it’s absolutely fantastic, tell us a little bit about the story of that business, how did you start that?
Luke: Well it was actually my mother’s idea, I was visiting my parents, one evening, several years ago, we were having a dinner together, and my mother said to me, she was having difficulty finding a birthday present for an elderly relative.
And this elderly relative happen to be particularly active during his life in trade union politics in the UK, labor union politics, and what my mother decided that this old guy needed was not a t-shirt, because, old British people don’t wear t-shirts, that’s what she said [smiling] and, what she decided that he really needed, was something that was gonna go through the letter box, and was going to be convenient and he can use every day, and she said, “I know, a tea towel, there must be some kind of political tea towel out there, a trade union tea towel”.
And she spent an hour googling this and couldn’t find anything. And when my mother told me this story, my brain kind of lit up, because one thing I’ve become aware of, in the world of business is that other people’s problems represent great business solutions, that’s where business can step in and help people out. And I’ve said to my mother, you should start a business selling political tea towels.
And, she looked at me like I was crazy, and she said, ”no, no, I wouldn’t be confident to do anything like that, I couldn’t do it”, and I’ve said, “well, you’ve got dad sitting here next to you, he’s a designer” and I reckon I can figure out Facebook and selling stuff online, and a website and stuff, so, hey, you know, let’s team up. My mother said, “I’ll only do it if we will doing it together” so we did.
Nas: Trade unions and tea towels, sounds kind of niche.
Luke: Yes, yeah, exactly and that’s what we believed at the time, you know, we thought that this was a super niche thing, that, we would kind of doing it for our own purposes, we just felt that these tea towels would be cool to give out to friends and relatives.
So, we were solving our own problem primarily, but I think the mistake that we made, continually throughout this business was thinking that it was such a niche thing. And it always pleases me when I tell the story of the business to people, or introduce myself, and people think, that must be such a nice thing, it must be so tiny, you can’t possibly make money out of it, and that’s music to my ears, cause then I know people are not going to compete with us [smiling] you know, in the online space today, being niche is a huge advantage, because the big boys, like Amazon, will have you less interested in competing with you.
And being niche as well means you can reach a particular audience who just love you, because you’ve targeted all of your stuff towards them, you’re speaking their language and you engage with them. And people I think love the idea of the small family business, that’s doing something interesting in the world. People like those stories, and that’s a way of connecting with people.
Sebastian: That sounds absolutely awesome Luke, so like eight years on, how many tea towels a year are you selling though?
Luke: A lot [smiling] it’s in the tens of thousands, now
Sebastian: [smiling] Wow incredible
Luke: But, yeah, it’s a lot. But in the UK now, tea towels are actually less than 50% of our business. So when we launch new markets, we always start out with the British tea towel, but a lot of our customers in the UK now, repeat customers that are coming back, and looking for maybe something different.
Sebastian: So tell us a little bit about the product itself, obviously I see the designs, they’re beautiful, very vibrant colors, what is the material, where is produced, tell us a little bit about that.
Luke: One interesting thing about our business is that we make our products in the UK, starting with the tea towels. That’s always been something that we’ve done, and it turned out to our surprise that there was this small textile manufacturing industry in Britain that held on despite all of the outsourcing that took place in the 1990s and it was still possible to make tea towels in Britain. Not just printing on blank tea towels but getting the cutting and the sowing and all the parts of the process done.
And so, we thought, well yeah, we want to do that in the UK, we want to work with these people. So that, a 100% cotton, the cotton comes from abroad, cause obviously it’s not grown in the UK, in fact I think most of the cotton is actually still growing in the US, bizarrely, where that industry is subsidized by the US government and then get sent to places like Turkey and Pakistan where it’s put onto a roll, then those blank rolls are sent back to the UK, where we print cotton and sow the tea towels in a factory here.
Nas: Where is your factory, cause textile industry is such a quintessentially British thing, right?
Luke: So, we actually work with several suppliers within the UK, but those, they tend to be, in places that have tradition- past the country that have traditionally supported that type of manufacturing including Lancashire and the Midlands.
Nas: So, what’s made you move into the US? And also I’m thinking tea towels, it sounds like quite British thing as well, you know -?
Luke: Yes, it is, in fact, one of the challenges that we still face in the US is the reaction of most people when they hear about our businesses what is a tea towel.
Sebastian: Ah interesting.
Luke: Quite a lot of people have no idea whatsoever and then you start to talk to them about dish towels which is a term Americans are all likely to use, even then a lot of people still don’t know what they are [smiling] because people there used to use paper towels a lot more.
Sebastian: That’s true, I agree.
Luke: And that was interesting, kind of change really for us, is the Americans quite often see our product as being an environmental product as well. Because it means that they’re not throwing away kitchen towels, paper towels, whereas, tea towel has always been part of something that’s been used in UK every day.
So, we actually kind of had additional selling points in the US, we haven’t really anticipated. Plus over there people seem to like the Made in Britain element of it, and they just love the concept of a tea towel, I think it seems something that is quintessentially British and I think that, it is.
Nas: Can you describe this one here, cause I feel like this is a really, quite British image?
Luke: Sure, so the image that you’re looking at the moment now is a design commemorating the Kinder trespass the Kinder mass trespass of 1932 I believe that it was, and this was where a bunch of campaigners got together and founded the Ramblers Association I believe it was called, and what they were protesting against was all of the enclosure of public lands that have been done throughout the decades leading up to that point.
The members of the public couldn’t just roam the countryside which they felt should be common land, they couldn’t just roam that freely. And those rights, interestingly, they didn’t win that campaign until, I think it was 2003 or something, whether was the right to roam past by the government at the time said that you know, said to be kept open and members of the public had the right to roam in national parks and throughout the British countryside.
Nas: So I wonder what made you want to expand to the US in the first place?
Luke: Good question. Cause it’s a lot of work [smiling]
Nas: Yes, it’s huge country, and you’re saying that a lot of people didn’t know what tea towels were, so yeah, what made you want to do that?
Luke: Well, one thing that we’ve noticed over the years selling in the UK, is that we would get a certain number of orders coming in from the US, and this was despite the fact that we did no marketing or outreach whatsoever to the US. And yet, people in America would be coming on our website, would be buying several designs, and then would be paying horrendous shipping rates, to get these products sent out to America.
Nas: Shows dedication, right?
Luke: Yeah, it showed dedication and that obviously, that was a big clue to us that we had a potential market out in America. I was well aware that you’ve got six times as many people living in America as you do in Britain. And so, in my mind that was potentially a six times greater market.
Even if you assume that people are less likely to have heard of tea towels, and maybe the marketing wouldn’t be successful or whatever else, you know, you’re still talking about, in my mind a market that could be at least as big of not way bigger than what we were doing in the UK. The other advantage that the US had for us, is that we wouldn’t need to translate our designs, you know, a lot of our designs got English quotations on, which obviously would work just as well, in my mind in the US there’s differences in spelling but that’s a trivial difference really.
And we were also aware that Americans, you know, I was aware when I’ve visited America a number of times that they do seem to value things that are made in Britain. You know, they see Made in Britain is a mark of quality, which it is, and they, you know, I think this is feeling of historical affinity between the US and the UK, that I felt is going to be in our favor.
Plus obviously, it’s a market where, where you’ve got a high degree online usage and engagement, online shopping is big in America, just like it is in Europe, and we felt that it was definitely something worth exploring.
Sebastian: How does it work with the logistics now, so are you producing the tea towels in the UK and then you ship them over in a container and then, have a warehouse there and then basically ship it from the US?
Luke: Yes, that’s exactly what we do. We have a warehouse in the US, the products they are still made in the UK. The interesting thing is that we didn’t set out to do that. At the beginning we assumed that the best thing to do would be to start making these tea towels in the US, so I went out in the US a couple of years ago, and searched desperately for manufacturers that would be able to make tea towels of the equivalent quality for us.
But the truth is that the manufacturing base just wasn’t there, in the US. I think it’s partly because there isn’t this tradition of tea towels like there is in UK, which meant small manufacturers in the UK be able to hold on, despite all of the outsourcing.
But I think it’s also because, well, I don’t know, manufacturing across the west has obviously suffered greatly and been outsourced typically to places in Asia, and so, some of the processes that you need to do just weren’t there.
I couldn’t find anybody in the US that was able to do the type of printing that we use, with the type of materials, the quality of materials and do the cutting and sowing. And anyway, close to acceptable cost for us. So, it led to us thinking what seemed unthinkable at the time, which is to keep our manufacturing base in the UK and export abroad.
Sebastian: So, that sounds really fascinating, now, we all know that the US in a way, I mean, slightly different, maybe more conservative politically, now I sense from your products here, that this is not just any product that you do, but it’s also a statement of your own beliefs, I guess. Did you find a lot of support for that in the US or did you think, well we have to maybe vary our standards a little bit, do different designs that cater more to the US market? How did that work?
Luke: Well the first thing to say is that, our designs represent a huge number of different views, of different politics, yes, you know, tends to be more radical, progressive themes, you know, we traditionally look to history for people who would try to change the status quo, and so, you know, it’s the opposite of conservatism if you like, in many ways.
That said, a lot of our designs, tough different views within our team who might disagree in different ways with different things. Plus one thing, we found that is that, when you’re particularly counting on individuals in history and holding a map as being these great wonderful people, everyone seems to have something in their past that then makes some people annoyed.
Sebastian: I know what you mean, yeah.
Luke: Yeah, one man’s hero is another man’s [smiling] enemy of the people, right, so, just a first thing to say, like I’ve said, I think we went to America on this assumption, exactly what you just stated, is assumption that it was just a more conservative place and therefore we would need to shift the context of our designs and focus perhaps more on some of the great fighters and heroes of the American history, like the Founding Fathers, and, while I’m glad that we do those types of designs, I’m particularly interested in American history and I think, with the history of democracy, I think it is absolutely fascinating and of real interest in particular in today’s times as well given the politics of the modern world.
What we found is that actually, you know, people were really interested in some of the more Left wing designs that we had as well and some of the more radical designs you could say. I don’t think it’s true that America is a more conservative place now, I mean, done business there for two years. What I think America is, is it is much bigger than anywhere else.
And so, what you tend to get is more extremes across everywhere, and more viability for a certain political niches as well. And this translates into, you know, moving away from politics, translates into any business that you might do as well, you know, something that might be too niche and not being viable at all in other parts of the world, can suddenly find in America, you’ve got a critical mass of people that are going to be really interested in your product or in our case in a particular design.
Sebastian: So are you already printing Bernie Sanders tea towels? [smiling]
Luke: [smiling] We haven’t done any Bernie Sanders tea towel, our preference- this is isn’t a completely strict rule that we have, but our preference is to stay away from some of the modern politics. Or at least, if we are going to touch on modern politics, to try and approach it in a ways that is based on principles, and timeless principles, as opposed to whatever particular policy or stance that someone might have on the day.
So we will never be doing a Donald Trump tea towel [smiling] for example, but taking sides in the democratic debate about who is best to oppose Donald Trump in that particular election, is not something that we’re about. That said, we have produced a tea towel celebrating Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American Supreme Court justice, because for us, we would look at her as somebody who had earned her place in history.
You know, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is somebody that people would be celebrating and remembering in a hundred year time, for what she has done, for the cause of equal rights and interpretation of the constitution in the US.
Sebastian: So particularly in the US, Amazon is really strong, 50% of all ecommerce in the States is done through Amazon, I mean it’s a huge number obviously, are you selling through Amazon as well? Or you’re just going through your own online shop?
Luke: We only sell through our website and of course we become retailers as I’ve mentioned earlier. And there are specific reasons for this, we generally stay away from platforms like Amazon and eBay and all the other platforms that are constantly contacting us [smiling] for us to sell our product.
This is a tough one, this is a tough one for small businesses, there are big advantages for being on the big platforms, the access to the audience you can get and the volumes that you can create, I think it’s particularly useful if you’re selling a product that people are already searching for directly, not many people are searching for radical tea towels online. And those who are they are coming across our website anyway.
So we don’t need to be- people are not searching for these things on Amazon in general. People need to, in order for us to get on their map, we’re more of a discovery product, that people, you know, they don’t know it exists, and then they find out about it, and then they’re interested, whereas eBay and Amazon I think work really well for people that are searching for specific things, they type into the search box, the products come up, they know what they’re looking to buy.
But there are other big disadvantages I think from being on these platforms, you know, you don’t get your customers emails so you can’t communicate with them directly. You know, they’re taking a large proportion of your revenue that you could instead spending on your own advertising directly to your website. It’s more work to sell directly to your website but I think what you’re doing is building your business more sustainable in the long term, and it’s less dependent on one of these big online players, suddenly deciding that they’re going to downgrade your listings or pull the plug on one of your products.
Sebastian: I think also, I think with your own products, I think the messaging is really important. I mean, I think it’s brilliant gift idea, fantastic, but I think people will always give that sort of gift if they are deeply identifying with the message, I mean it’s not random, right, you don’t give this out at random and think well whatever some guy’s printed on there, it mean something.
Luke: Right.
Sebastian: And hence, I guess, you would be willing to wait longer or go through the motions of having to enter the credit card details again even though they’re already stored in Amazon so, I think you are very well positioned there, because it has such a strong message, the product, also I think for the giver who gives that gift to someone to say something, you know, more than just, like, here’s some piece of cloth to dry dishes-
Luke: Yeah, and I mean, our tea towels, you know, they are very absorbent, they are very high quality, they are very strong you know they last you know they have good color fast.
Sebastian: They have a good size, I mean, they are much bigger than many tea towels.
Luke: Exactly, exactly, but, if we’re turning up in listings on Amazon, you know, we sell our tea towels in US for $22 if we’re showing up there $22 for a tea towel, against listings for, you know, tea towels made very cheaply, mass produced in some factory, in some other part of the world, for $1 a piece, $2 a piece, well, you know, if just somebody wants to buy a tea towel, there’s no competition there, right. But we’re not really selling tea towels, that’s the thing, the tea towel is a medium for particular messages and ideas, and the ability for somebody to make a statement about who they are and what they believe in as well.
Sebastian: And a really nice design of course, as well.
Nas: Do you know much about your customers in the US, I’m thinking age ranges or maybe even like political affiliation or kind of jobs they do and stuff, I kind of have a bit of an assumption of who might be into this kind of product, but I’m wondering if you know much about the customers?
Luke: Yeah, so, we’re getting more data all the time about who our customers are and Google and social media obviously kind of sharing some of this stuff with you, we don’t have enough yet, or I haven’t done analysis to notice particular differences between the US and the UK yet, but what we do know is that our products appeal particularly to people that are quite educated, typically a post graduate degrees for example, and obviously people who are engaged with political content and enjoy doing that on social media.
Obviously people who are interested in history as well, and genuinely it appeals to, the thing is, a lot of young people share our stuff, and are interested in, and love our designs, and will like it on Instagram, you know whether they necessarily make a purchase you know is, cause a lot of young people are strapped for cash these days, right-
Nas: But that’s exactly like the sort of people I see being into this cause it somehow ties with the whole hipster thing and that kind of thing, you know, law fighting that is going on, which is kind of funny, cause I think, tea towels, we might instantly think, I don’t know, granny’s or older people, but also I think it would appeal to younger generation.
Luke: Right, and that’s another mistake that we’ve made is that we’ve always assumed that we were selling to older demographic, set some of our initial targeting and messaging was based to the assumption that we were appealing to, you know, women over the age of forty who had money and actually, we have noticed this like, over time people are becoming more and more interested across the different age groups.
I think, what we’ve found in America is older people are more likely to know what a tea towel is, particularly older women, and so that is our advantage there, they immediately grasped the concept, whereas I think for other age groups there’s this kind of reeducation process for things to take place, and actually on the US one of the first pages you see in the menu buy is the page What is a tea towel? Where we explain to people what a tea towel actually is, we don’t need to put that on the UK website.
Nas: So Luke, you guys have been in the US for about two years now, what are your Dos and Don’ts for other companies and businesses who want to make that leap?
Luke: The most important Do, is just to get selling there immediately. Get selling as soon as you can. I think there’s this huge amount of worry that, particularly small businesses have about exporting abroad in general and selling in the US, and I think people get bogged down in things like, technical questions, oh do I need to have set for US company in order to sell over there, oh what about import duties, oh you know, what about the spellings being different in the US, or you need to talk to your audience differently.
All of those things are true, you need to look at all of those things at some point, but I think the most important thing is get the data first to show that US consumers are actually interested in your product. Now we already had some of this cause we have US customers who were coming on our UK website and buying.
But we still, one of the first things was we just go out there, find a warehouse, ship very small amount of products over and then set up a US website to start selling. And everything else to do with this process we’ve started dealing with afterwards, once we were already super motivated because we can see the sales coming in to the US, so I would say, don’t allow things like state sales taxes, and legal complexities to be excuses for not starting selling over in the US as soon as you possibly can.
Nas: But that can be daunting, right, cause in the UK from what I know we don’t have these different taxes across the country. So I mean, was that daunting to you, how did you deal with sort of all these complexities that you’re coming up against?
Luke: Well, we did a lot of our own research and we went to various talks and things that were run by different companies that were offering services. I think the most important thing for us was actually getting out there and then starting to talk to people on the ground, and obviously Google is a big friend of yours. I think the main reason I make that point about things like state sales taxes is that quite often these things kick in above a certain threshold.
Sebastian: Correct, you’re absolutely right.
Luke: And, you know, if you’re a small business in particular, you know, if you’re selling a few hundred dollars to a particular state, in a particular year, it’s just not an issue that you need to be worrying about, so don’t worry about the stuff that, you know [smiling] before you need to start worrying about it, kind of thing, because you have enough on your plate as it is, you know, I know this, you have enough on your plate by getting your products out there and doing the marketing. So that’s why I feel like the shift of your efforts needs to be put in.
Nas: So you just mentioned talking to people on the ground, where were you going, who were you talking to, what were they saying to you?
Luke: Well two years ago I got on a plane and I just went to Philadelphia.
Nas: Why Philadelphia?
Luke: For number of specific reasons-
Nas: I’m thinking US history-
Luke: Yeah, exactly, first of all Philadelphia is the historic capital of the United States, that’s where the Constitution and the Bill of Rights first came from and American democracy first got started, secondly, Pennsylvania has a very competitive 6% sales tax rate, very hard to beat, in particular if you want to be on the East Coast, speaking of the East Coast, that we were short, plain journey away from the UK, there are a lots of ports along the East Coast, it’s easy to ship in your container shipments and get them at your warehouse at a very short space of time. There are a lot of fulfillment third party logistics warehouses in the Pennsylvania area, that was a big help for us, and you know, I personally wanted us to be close to a big vibrant American city that was going to be fun to visit, because if you have to make a number of trips out to America, you want to be somewhere that’s just fun to hang out.
Nas And so, who were you speaking to about your product, what were they saying, where were you going, because, especially if you’re mostly selling online, I’m wondering where do you find a radical tea towel congregate, where do you find them?
Luke: Well, one thing that I did when I went out to Philadelphia is, after I’d arrived I managed to make contact with the State business department, they had whole department for encouraging foreign business in Pennsylvania, they were connecting me with people all the time, other small business owners in the area, other British entrepreneurs who worked in the Philadelphia area, in fact I made a number of, you know, lifelong friends, I’m going back there for someone’s wedding next year, as a result of connections I made couple of years ago.
And also, there was a particular guy in the department of business in Philadelphia, who drove me two hours to a small town where there was a coffee morning taking place of some elderly women who were really interested in politics. He happened to know these women, he knew they were interested in politics and I was able to take a number of our designs and sit around the table with them, and just tell them our story and ask them for some feedback, ask them who are the types of designs we should be making and what they thought of the business concept in general. And those old women were extremely helpful and very knowledgeable and just wonderful ladies that have supported the business ever since we first went out there a couple of years ago.
Nas: What were they saying, cause I feel like older women are really, they’re really honest with their opinions, so what was the feedback you were getting from them?
Luke: Oh they loved the tea towels in general, they loved the idea, they had very strong opinions about who should be on them, and they felt very strongly about the product should be made in the US or the UK, they wanted hangers for the wall, that’s something we still haven’t done actually, they wanted to hang the tea towels up with a special type of hanger and in fact if anyone listens to this [smiling] I know somewhere we can get hangers manufacturer that we can sell on the website at the point of checkout that would be really useful because we haven’t been able to create something that practical yet, but for them it was a matter of like displaying these designs, as opposed to having them tucked away in the drawer, or use for drying the dishes everyone’s in a while.
Nas: Sounds like a work of art, that’s kind of how they were viewing that.
Luke: Yeah, exactly.
Sebastian: Excellent, that was very interesting, just one last question, so our producer here is a big Che Guevara fan, do you have any Che Guevara tea towels?
Luke: We do have a Che Guevara tea towel in both UK and US websites
Sebastian: Well there you go [smiling] and I was going to buy as a gift now [smiling]
Luke: [smiling] Fantastic, it’s one of the popular ones
