Caleb Brown

Handmade Tea was a monthly subscription service built to make loose leaf tea feel more like wine or craft beer: nuanced, seasonal, and worth exploring. Each shipment featured a new handcrafted blend along with tasting notes designed to help customers better understand flavor profiles and discover tea in a more thoughtful, enthusiast-driven way. Launched in 2011, the product combined recurring delivery, original blend development, and strong brand storytelling into an early direct-to-consumer subscription business. Gary Vaynerchuk was an early investor and it has been featured in Wired, BuzzFeed, NY Magazine, and more.

Technically, Handmade Tea was built with PHP, MySQL, and the Recurly API to support subscriptions and recurring billing, but the more interesting work was around product and growth. I was not only building the ecommerce experience, but also shaping the subscription model, creating tasting-note driven packaging, iterating on gift options, and using social/community channels to grow a customer base around a niche product with limited resources. That combination of product design, brand positioning, and early audience-building was what made the business work.

Tech stack
PHP
MySQL
Recurly API