Case Study: Tea Tasting for Anomaly's CHA Rebrand

When Anomaly’s API Collective renamed itself CHA, the brief that came our way was about as good as a brief gets: mark the rebrand with an all-agency tea tasting, and make it something as many people as possible could actually join. The name was chosen because it means tea, one element wide enough to hold a far-flung collective and bring it around a single table. Our job was to put that idea in a cup and hand it to roughly sixty people over their lunch hour.

So one weekday around noon, in Anomaly’s office, we set up a table and started pouring.

Not a lecture

The thing we were surest about going in: nobody should have to sit down for a presentation. Sixty people in a working agency don’t free up at the same minute, and the fastest way to make tea feel like homework is to put it on a schedule. So we ran it as a guided sampling station, come over when you have a gap, taste through the flight, ask whatever you want, drift back to your desk. The teas brewed straight through the hour, so there was always a fresh pour waiting and never a wrong time to turn up.

The flight

Three teas, light to dark, built to show some range without turning into a tasting exam.

Tender Leaf - A gentle, fresh green, the kind of opening sip that lowers everyone’s shoulders a little. A small sentimental note: we poured the very last of our Tender Leaf inventory that afternoon. If it caught you and you’ve gone looking for it since, the closest greens we stock now are Canyon Green and Mount Pyrus.

Oriental Beauty - The favorite of the day. Honeyed and ripe, with a soft muscatel sweetness that’s the unmistakable signature of a bug-bitten Taiwanese oolong. (Yes, bug-bitten. The leafhoppers nibble the leaves, the plant responds, and you get the honey. It’s as odd and wonderful as it sounds.)

Iron Goddess - Darker, roasted oolong that sits closer to coffee than to tea, all toast and grounding warmth. We brought it partly as a bridge for the coffee drinkers in the room, and it did its job.

Green

Oriental Beauty

Iron Goddess

One treat alongside, and we left it at that: our tinybars, enough to round out the flight without crowding the table.

Taiwan, on the office screens

The best touch of the day wasn’t ours. The Anomaly team put our Taiwan sourcing photos and videos up on the office screens while we poured, so the cups going around New York had the hillsides, the farms, and the makers behind them playing in the background. It’s easy to forget at a table in Manhattan, that every one of these teas comes from a particular place and a particular person. The screens quietly did the remembering for us.

And then it was one o’clock

A rebrand usually gets announced. This one got tasted. For an hour the new name had a table to stand around, three teas to hold mild opinions about, and a treat to reach for, which is a friendlier way to meet a word than finding it in an email.

For our part, it’s the kind of event we like best: one table, a few pots of tea, and a real reason for people to gather around it.

Bring tea into your office

Té Company runs corporate tea tastings, staffed tea bars, and private tea experiences for offices, agencies, client events, and cultural celebrations around New York City. If you’ve got an occasion, we’d love to build a tasting around it.

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