Star Tribune:
By her own admission, Lindsey Valentini’s headlong flight into the gourmet tea business did not initially promise a very smooth landing.
She had no idea how to create a marketable tea blend, Valentini said, noting that the results of experiments with various blends in her kitchen “weren’t nearly good enough.”
Once she’d cleared that hurdle, she blew her savings on 60,000 cans of tea packaged by a company in Indonesia, with only a vague notion of how she was going to sell the product.
“I started selling off my website, and I just imagined that people would find it somehow and start placing orders,” said Valentini, 28, founder of a company she dubbed Tea District. “Of course, it didn’t happen.”
But we’re talking an exceedingly determined, entrepreneurial young woman here. Valentini not only figured out how to blend a successful tea line, she quickly switched her focus to the more promising wholesale market.
“I grew up with the mentality of being your own boss,” said Valentini, who started and left four sales jobs in the 18 months after her 2003 graduation from the University of St. Thomas with a degree in entrepreneurship and computer science.
Photo by Star Tribune.