"The packaging was born out of necessity and style," says 30-yr-old Steep founder Jeff Piazza. Steep puts its teas in a paper tea "ball," which makes a conventional paper envelope inappropriate as a secondary package. The matchbox not only protects the ball, but "gets attention and drives home the company's image." Piazza says it's part of a phenomenon he calls "cereal box culture," where consumers want to read while they're eating their cereal or drinking tea. Introduced in 1995, Steep gained national distribution via a road trip that Piazza took to coffeehouses around the country. Seventeen varieties are currently available, with a suggested retail price ranging from $1.25 to $2.25. BP Products (Hamden, CT) supplies the trays and sleeves, as well as a shipper. Made of a kraft/chipboard combination and offset-printed in two colors, the box is shipped to Steep as a flat blank for manual assembly and filling. Tea balls are made by hand, too. Pressure-sensitive paper labels are flexo-printed by Action Packaging Systems (Ellington, CT) and are hand-applied, as well. Piazza admits that costs for the tea matchbox are at a premium, yet there are still some specialty companies with more expensive packaging. "We wanted folks to think about tea," reiterates Piazza, "even if they're drinking coffee at another table....that's the power of packaging."
