Gift order help — message cards, delivery timing, recipient notes

What you get

• Handwritten message card text crafted in house voice — calm, personal, no cliché

• Delivery-date optimisation against seasonal transit windows across Europe

• Custom recipient brewing notes with steeping times, water temperature, and the tea’s story

• A printed leaflet explaining the tea’s origin — mountain, prefecture, and production year

• Coordination with couriers for peak-season reliability, including tracking handoff

• Gift invoice with personal greeting and no pricing visible to the recipient

• Priority email response within one business day during Q4 and spring festival windows

How we prepare your tea gift

You reach us by form or email, often in the quiet of an autumn evening, thinking of a recipient who might recognise the dry click of a pu’erh cake unwrapping or the soft weight of a gaiwan in hand. The gift order help team, led by Sandry Law, receives the request and gathers three things: the tea you have chosen, the name of the person who will open it, and the feeling you want the gift to hold.

The first step is the message card. We work with your words — a sentence, a memory, a phrase lifted from a shared cup years ago — and temper them into the house voice. It is never saccharine. The note often begins with the tea’s name in italic pinyin, its characters in parentheses: the bright Bái Háo Yín Zhēn (白毫银针) from Fuding, or a 2008 Yìwǔ Shēng Pǔ’ěr (易武生普洱) pressed in stone moulds. Sandry will check the sourcing claim: whether the leaves came from a single garden above Lincang or a small cooperative in Menghai, and if the recipient would appreciate a short note about the spring harvest date. The card is handwritten with ink on textured stock, then scanned for digital preview before shipping.

Next, the brewing notes. We imagine the recipient unwrapping the cake, the brittle-edged leaves releasing a faint camphor and dried date aroma. Our guide walks them through a first rinse — water just off the boil, a five-second wash to wake the tea — then the first real steep, ten seconds, pouring a liquor the colour of pale honey. We describe the mouthfeel that follows: round, coating the tongue, with a returning sweetness that lingers low in the throat. If the gift is a greener selection — a first-flush Lóng Jǐng (龙井) from Xihu — we will instruct lowering the temperature to 80 °C, explaining how too much heat would mute the chestnut creaminess and bring forward a brittle edge. Every brewing note ends with a link to tea.school, where the recipient can watch short video tutorials on gong fu cha technique, and a quiet nudge that members of tea.community receive weekly cupping notes that deepen the practice.

Timing is the spine of a seasonal gift. The team cross-references order dates against carrier performance data from previous winters, flagging any window where a parcel might stall in a sorting centre during the December swell. We might suggest shipping a week earlier than the calendar suggests, or selecting a lighter cake that travels better in sub-zero conditions. For porcelain additions — like the hand-thrown gaiwans listed on tea.equipment — we coordinate with the warehouse to double-box and use insulated padding, because a cracked rim is an unkind discovery on a cold morning.

Before the order is finalised, you receive a single PDF preview: the card text, the brewing leaflet, the gift invoice with its personal greeting and no pricing. You can adjust a word, ask for a different tea if the season calls for it, or add a second message in another language. Once confirmed, the parcel is handed to the courier with tracking that pings directly back to your email, so you know the moment it leaves the sorting hub. The service closes not with a goodbye but with a note from Sandry — brief, warm — letting you know the package is on its way and that the brewing notes will soon be in the hands of someone who, with a little hot water and a few minutes, can taste the mountain the tea remembers.

Who leads this

• Sandry Law — Heads order operations, sourcing-claim issuance, and the media contact.

How it works

• Where — Remote — submit via tea.support/help or email

• Turnaround — Same business day during Q4; 48 hours otherwise

• Languages — English, Chinese (Mandarin)

• What to include — Recipient name, desired message tone, tea selection details

• Delivery regions — Europe and UK, with international timing checks on request

• Support hours — Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00 CET, extended to 20:00 in November–December

• Handwritten preview — Scanned card sent before dispatch; adjustments welcome