Tell us about East Forged.
East Forged is a new style of iced tea for lovers of speciality tea. No longer do you have to wait hours for your tea to cold brew. EF is brewed naturally without sugar, colours or flavours and respectfully crafted by tea specialists – Kym Cooper and Tania Stacey
What inspired you to start East Forged?
Mass produced tea drinks use tea extracts that need sweeteners to counteract the natural bitterness. Homemade from scratch, iced tea takes between 6 – 8 hours to cold brew. Delicious, but what happens when you have a friend unexpectedly drop by and you forgot to cold brew your tea leaves?! The solution is East Forged.
Tell us about your career and background.
Kym was a Charted Accountant and Tania was a State Sales Manager for a Lighting company. We both wanted to move away from corporate life and start our own tea businesses. We first met at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo and started to lament about the state of the iced tea market, noting the lack of healthy options and natural delicious taste of loose-leaf tea. The rest is history, as they say…
Describe a typical workday for you.
Kym lives in Brisbane and Tania is in regional Victoria, each holds different responsibilities within the company, but both start their day with a generous cup of Indian black tea!
Kym runs with her brown Labrador at 5am every day, while listening to podcasts. Tania gets up a little later and tends to her miniature goats and garden. The rest of the morning is filled by sales calls, deliveries and/or packing orders.
The afternoon is for meetings with suppliers, contractors and mentors. Kym fits in a school pick-up and after school activities before hitting the computer again after the family dinner. Tania is back taking care of her goats and chickens, before tackling Instagram reels!
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
Surround yourself with supportive people and other founders. Join a start-up community like Start-up Victoria, watch the pitch nights and hang out with other founders. Don’t worry about talking to mentors in the start-up community – they will provide the best tools to work out if you have a good business idea. There are lots of resources and mentors available via Office Hours. Kym and Tania were lucky to find each other. It’s very hard to do it by yourself!
What’s next for you, and East Forged?
We are in the planning stages of scaling up to become available in major supermarkets around Australia. Our customers have told us they want to be able to grab some cans of East Forged while they’re buying food for entertaining at home or a picnic. Look out for our 4 can packs!
The Boosting Female Founders grant will allow us to build economies of scale, start initial investigations into exporting overseas and dabble in Augmented Reality – getting the East Forged ‘tea pets’ into your lounge room!
