Editorial Team
5 min read
For Amber Fouche, tea isn’t just her business—it’s an homage to her matriarchal lineage. It’s medicine, comfort, and a source of connection. As a fourth-generation herbalist, Fouche is honoring her familial legacies with her globally sourced organic tea company Tea ParTea by Clara Jewel in St. Louis, Missouri.
Tea-making runs deep in Fouche’s veins and is a familial passion and craft that can be traced back to her great-grandmother. For Fouche, drinking tea is a way to connect with her late grandmother who helped raise her.
“My grandmother was a huge tea drinker, so that’s how I was introduced to tea. That’s how we bonded. We bonded over tea before school, after school, and before bed. We would talk about the day over a cup of tea,” says Fouche.
When her grandmother passed away, Fouche wanted to honor her legacy the only way she knew how, by opening her own tea establishment. The tea maven also wanted to celebrate her family’s cultural history of being herbalists.
“My grandmother was an herbalist, and my great-grandmother was an herbalist. They grew up on farms and were sharecroppers,” Fouche shared. She referred to the history of enslaved Africans who were brought to America during the transatlantic slave trade who were unable to access adequate healthcare services.
“They had to find other means of healthcare, and that’s where herbalism in our family became a part of our heritage. Those things were passed down from generation to generation,” said Fouche.
Building a tea haven
To kickstart her tea empire, Fouche began selling a handful of herbal teas online in 2021 and quickly began ideating how she could expand her business. After attending a world tea expo, Fouche connected with a master tea blender from Germany who helped her to expand her selection of teas with globally sourced ingredients. “That was the birth of Tea ParTea outside of herbal and ayurvedic blends,” said Fouche.
Expanding her selection of tea offerings wasn’t the only kind of expansion that Fouche had in mind. She had her sights set on opening her own tea-centered storefront. Fouche wanted to avoid funding her operation with a business loan, and worked for nearly a decade in law enforcement in order to self-finance a brick-and-mortar business.
“We had no idea that there were so many tea drinkers in St Louis. People are really excited to have an actual brick-and-mortar location where they can come to explore a wide variety of different certified organic tea blends and try free samples every day. Our samples are steeped fresh daily, and every day our samples are different, which allows our customers to explore a plethora of our blends and discover the blends that work for them. Customers can come into the store and explore our teas by tasting and smelling the different blends,” said Fouche. “Our goal is to give our customers access to clean ingredients at an affordable rate.”
Tea ParTea by Clara Jewel, which is named after Fouche’s grandmother and mother, offers more than 125 tea blends in its storefront and more than 150 blends on its website, clarajewelteas.com, and through several online distributors such as Walmart.com and Amazon.com. Customers can create their own variety box of tea through the shop’s online site with up to four different tea blends. All of Tea ParTea’s blends are masterfully blended and bagged by hand “to protect the integrity of the tea.”
“Our tea bags are clean, natural, and free of chemical compounds just like our teas. They’re biodegradable and made using unprocessed and unbleached paper,” says Fouche.
Simplifying with Clover
Fouche relies on her Clover Station POS system for much of her business operations, including tracking her storefront’s inventory with ease. She also uses Homebase for employee scheduling and payroll, and she has integrated QuickBooks with her Clover retail POS system for reporting and sales tracking. What’s more, with Clover Customer Engagement, Tea ParTea customers are able to sign up for a rewards program that offers discounts and special promotions for return customers.
“Patrons can get 10 percent off their order if they sign up for the rewards program. Every time we host a sale, I’ll put it on Clover. And the people that have signed up receive a text message or an email advising them that we’re having a sale,” Fouche says. “We also offer a point system as part of our rewards program, and a lot of our customers come back just to get points, so they can keep coming back to use them, which really helps with customer retention. Clover offers so many different points-of-sales and takes so many different forms of payment that I’m really impressed with the system.”
As Fouche continues to build her tea empire, she is hopeful of opening more Tea ParTea locations in other cities in Missouri and Illinois in the next couple of years.
“My goal is to have as many stores as there are Starbucks all over the country.”
Read more stories about merchants like Tea ParTea and how Clover is helping them expand their businesses and their offerings.
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