How do we help to encourage conversation over tea and how are we helping the community this year!
This week may be focused on Black Friday, for which we are taking part, but we want to use our offer as an opportunity to encourage good tea as a catalyst for conversation and combating loneliness. This isn't just about a flash sale, but accessibility to our products and one of our main brand messages:
Our tagline is 'Bringing Community and Creativity together, A Little Cup at a Time', so we want to make sure we honour our promise!
This week we are offering 20% off all of our products until the 27th November to encourage accessibility and conversation over tea.
The AL-BREW-NY Blend
This week we are launching the Al-BREW-Ny Blend, in collaboration with the brilliant
'Meet Me At' group based at The Albany, Deptford.
Meet Me At is a group set up by The Albany and Entelechy Arts, a Lewisham (South East London) charity working on projects that "test the boundaries between art, creativity, care, wellbeing and community."
Meet Me At is a weekly all-day arts club for isolated older people. It is an amazing opportunity to build a community through conversation and creativity - could there be a better organisation to work with!?
We have been working with Meet Me At to create an Albany-specific tea blend since the start of the year and it is finally here! The blend was created out of an initial 'taste and create' workshop we ran with the Meet Me At group in early 2022, where we did tasting, blending and drawing creative responses as a collective 'smellscape (image above, left).
The artwork and feedback were developed into an actual blend, combining their fluid and fiery mark-making, with comments on "feeling hot, hot, hot!" - the invented brew combines familiar fruits such as mango and pineapple with a warming kick from the ginger, peppercorns and chilli, wrapped in a green tea base.
The packaging design was commissioned to a local artist Isobel Williams, who took the outstanding features from the initial 'smellscape' and developed the mark making into a coherent pattern, which we think is wonderful!
Final Al-BREW-Ny packaging design
Our Offer
From now until Christmas we will be donating £1 (around 20%) of each Al-BREW-Ny sale to support funding for Meet Me At!
Conversation and Loneliness
Loneliness is a huge issue, especially in the elderly community and over the colder months. This is particularly for people who are vulnerable and want or need to stay inside more to stay protected and comforted.
At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I (George) volunteered for a food supply charity in Lewisham which provided boxes to those ordered to SHIELD when the rate of infection was very dangerous. Next to me in the office were volunteers providing a befriending service to vulnerable people, in particular the elderly. Of course, the food was a huge necessity, but the befriending service was just as desired and required. Conversations that were had we those of kindness and sound boarding for people who were feeling particularly isolated and lonely. It was an amazing eye opener to the necessity for community accessibility.
Our other offer
Don't forget, we are also still donating profits of our Breakfast Brew blend to
Rare Charity until the end of November. Rare Charity helps provide education to people in tea communities, currently focusing their efforts in Malawi.
We at A Little Cup have an aim for our blends to be a catalyst for conversation and communal environments. The blends themselves both uplift and soothe in order to provide a comfortable atmosphere for discussion.
Anything we can do to support this is a win for us - make sure you try to offer a cuppa to someone this season - it is a small gesture that goes a long way.
Love + Tea x