Factory Tour Lessons

Last week I went on a tour of the Celestial Seasonings factory in Boulder, Colorado. I've been a fan of the company for many years and we often serve their tea at the studio, so while I was in Boulder I figured it would be pretty lame not to go check it out.I always seem to end up on beverage tours. As Atlanta grade-schoolers we were regularly trotted out to the CocaCola museum for class trips. I've been to the Guiness Museum in Dublin on two occasions. I've toured the Yebisu Beer Factory in Tokyo twice as well. And a handful of wineries in Europe as well. I'm not sure why I'm drawn to beverage tours but it probably has something to do with the desire for free stuff.

Anyway, after thinking on it a few days I've gotten my thoughts together about what I learned at the Celestial Seasonings plant. I'm going to list them here from the most personal to the most global lessons learned on this 45 minute tour.

1. I am a bit of a tea geek. Throughout the tour the leader paused to ask a few questions about tea history and the details of making herbal blends. Each time it was kind of embarrassing as Gwen, Joel and I were the only people with our hands up. In fact we had to stop taking the sample tea packets they were giving away as prizes because we had won too many. Most of the other people on the tour seemed to have little previous knowledge of tea despite having enough gumption to take a tour of a tea factory. I love knowing where the things that I consume come from. I also watch "How It's Made" whole seasons at a time.

2. Seeing how things are produced is a bit like meeting a celebrity, a bit of a letdown through the sheer ordinariness of the whole thing. Wherever there is a mystery, the mind will tend to fill in the gaps with information that is much more colorful than the reality. You can see this in old nautical maps marked, "Here be Dragons," in the way we imagine Hollywood stars must spend their free time doing unimaginably interesting things. The image I carried of Celestial Seasonings was of native peoples picking endless green fields of organically grown herbs to be masterfully blended by a man in a plaid shirt with suspenders and a beard. The reality consists of the mundane modern technology of forklifts, rolls of paper, and assembly lines. I remember one time in Morocco a French tourist was taking photos of the Berbers, and asked for a little boy to step outside the frame of a picture because while his companions were wearing traditional garb he was wearing a T-shirt. Funny how we want to keep the magic of our illusions even when the truth is staring us in the face.

3. Change or die. Celestial Seasonings is famous for its hippyish box art and feel-good quotes plastered on every side of the packaging. In fact the waiting room for the tour is a kind of museum with all the original paintings on the walls. It was pretty wild to see the original Sleepytime Bear painting just inches from my face. But if you've picked up some Celestial Seasonings recently you'll have noticed the design change. Gone are the syrupy quotes, the long haired fairies, and the unicorns.They made this switch about a year ago, and I'm sure it was hard for some of the older staff to say goodbye to such a long tradition. But when I got home and looked at the tea boxes I had bought, I was looking at a cohesive branding effort with clean lines, a disciplined color pallette, and a feeling of being made in the 2000s, not the 70s. Sometimes the things about your business that you are most famous for are the same ones that are holding you back.4. Robots are winning. One of the most surprising things about the tour was that on the assembly line floor there were only about half a dozen people. All of the tea that Celestial Seasonings produces, for all the world, 1.6 billion bags of tea per year, has a floor staff of 6. And those people are there just in case the robots break down. Everything is automated. There is very little chance that a human hand ever touched your tea before you take it out of the box. This doesn't bother me but it does convince me of one thing, we need to have less babies. Because there just isn't enough work for people anymore. Think about it. The regions that have the steepest declining birthrates, Japan, Europe, and the US, all have a lot of freakin robots.

5. We all need to think about our own factory tour. One thing that was clear at the tea tour is that the Hain Celestial Group has nothing to hide. Everything was open, we were actually on the floor, just inches away from the product, and not ushered through those skybox things that so many tours make you do. This tells me that Celestial Seasonings has a lot of confidence in the quality and for lack of a better word, "goodness," of its product. In contrast to the beer factory tours, it was nice to see a product being made that has little waste, is not noxious at any point during it's making, and is simple enough to be explained in a 30 minute walk around a factory.

This is a good way to think about your own business. Imagine you have to give a tour to a group of interested visitors. What part of your job would you be proud to show off? What parts would you have to hurry by lest anyone look too closely? How much spin would you have to apply? Perhaps it's time to address those things that you've been hiding away. I did this thought experiment on the studio and came to the conclusion that I would have been apologizing for the tatty signboards at the entrance. I'll be replacing them this weekend!