Jamila McGill and Alfonso “Ali” Wright opened Brooklyn Tea in Bed-Stuy in 2019, not long after winning $10,000 in Brooklyn Public Library’s PowerUP! Business Plan Competition.
In Part 1 of this two-part interview, I talk with Jamila - while we were both drinking tea, of course - about how their business has fared during the pandemic, and… about Shonda Rhimes and Beyoncé too(!)
Ellen Mehling: It is now more than one year since everything shut down for all of us. How have you been this past year? How have you weathered the COVID storm?
Jamila McGill: Yes, “weather this storm” is a perfect way to put it, for sure. It's been ebbs and flows for us. At the start of the year of 2020 we had just turned a year old. So we were just starting to kind of get the foot traffic we were looking to see; we were just starting to get that sales revenue that we were hoping to get close to. And we were already making plans, Ali and I, to be out at more events to keep on spreading the name of the brand. As you can see that's very counter to what happened next.
We were being asked to not only be in more, but to also be pretty much empty as a store. We were going from a store that was finally starting to get those lines out the door that every small business hopes to get, to… there were days when Ali and I were just sitting here, watching documentaries on Netflix. It was daunting and it was scary. It was heartbreaking. It was all the things that every small business owner says it was like, especially that beginning month or so of COVID.
That was hard; we cut our staff hours and our store hours down. Sales went from, anywhere from like a 50% decline a day to sometimes like an 80% decline in sales; it was tough. As a new business, we didn't have much of a cushion to rely on. It was very hard to not think, “Is the end near?"
What was helpful, is: we are a tea shop. We are a place where people are looking to heal themselves, to be more in control of what's going into their bodies and how they can be more in control of their immune systems. We were fortunate enough that we started online, so we didn't have to start from scratch with creating that platform, we had it up and running. It was never really a source of our revenue [before], but it was great to be able to tap into, and to basically gear our audience towards that. We created an “Immunity Box” that was filled with some herbs that we already had at the store.
EM: I saw that, on the site! Excellent.
JM: Yes, it is just really highlighting the benefits that are research-proven to help people. Whether it’s something for yourself, so you can feel more in control of what you're doing for your body or if it's just to remind a friend that you're thinking about them in the middle of a pandemic. That really was our initial glimpse of hope into how we were going to make it through, and then after that, we had a series of fortunate events, in June.
I will say a series of fortunate events for us, but it was kind of on the back of tragedies and the outcry against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. From that came “Support Black Business”, and that just changed our business and what it looked like tremendously.
There's no way we could have seen the amount of support happening for our business when our business was a year and a half old. All within the same ten days: first we were featured in a CBS segment, then picked up by New York Magazine as a feature of a Black business to support. Two days following that we got a tweet from Shonda Rhimes; she was highlighting the CBS feature. Shonda Rhimes, a mogul, just saw a local CBS feature! We were super grateful.
And then the very next day, after the Shonda Rhimes tweet, I get a text from a friend. She said, “Hey, I think you're on Beyoncé’s curated list of Black businesses to support”. So, oh, wow, all in that ten-day span!
EM: Shonda Rhimes and then Beyoncé?! Your head must have been spinning!
JM: Of course, that was a mix of crying, screaming, dropping to the floor, and everything that you're supposed to do when Shonda Rhimes and Beyoncé highlight you, I did that.
Our business has really just never been the same. We've been able to hold on to a lot of that momentum, which we didn't know at the time. There was a lot of fear for my partner. Ali, and myself, around, ”Will this just be a trend for the month, or it will be a fad, will it go away”. And it just has held steady.
EM: Fantastic.
JM: We’ve been able to have a lot of access to different corporations and partner with them, that I'm not sure we would have had access to prior. We're just really fortunate to have a foot in the door, and be able to maintain that and to see corporations and businesses commit to supporting and being in partnership with black businesses, outside of the month of February. That's been great to see as well.
EM: What happened later in the summer? Were you able to return staff to their full hours, when things started turning around?
JM: Thanks for bringing that up. We had been able to hold on to our staff, whose hours were reduced. Instead of folks getting their thirty hours part-time they were getting fifteen hours. Sometimes, we were just making enough just to pay them. We weren't taking anything extra. That's just what it was, you know, our team has been super supportive and there for us, so it made sense to kind of figure it out.
Prior to COVID we were about a four- or five-man team, including myself and Ali and afterwards, after that series of fortunate events that I mentioned, our team grew to nine. And we even have some, I guess you could say, seasonal workers and so grew up to eleven.
EM: So, your team actually grew. That's the best of all possible outcomes.
JM: (laughing) At that point it was, “Can anybody work extra hours?”
In Part 2 we’ll hear some more about Brooklyn Tea’s collaborations and awards, and plans for the future.
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Did you know that the Business & Career Center is moving to a new larger public space in the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza? The relocation and renovation took place over the past year, along with other major renovations of the 80-year-old building. Stay tuned for a re-opening announcement!
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