Corinne Noyes

From a background in fast-moving consumer goods, Corinne Noyes has managed to woo women and Woolworths with Madame Flavour, a specialty loose leaf tea company which is on track to double last year’s revenue of $2 million this year.

Noyes says Madame Flavour captures a gap in the tea market: women who want a beautiful infuser pod, available from a supermarket and at a cheaper price than specialist tea retailers.  

Speaking to SmartCompany from France, Noyes says Madame Flavour is “firmly a global brand”, and has been approached from distributors and buyers across the globe. 

How did your business start out? Have you always been interested in tea? 

The business came about really through my developing a brand with someone I was helping with marketing work. She had a fair trade distribution business, and my background is marketing, so I started giving her advice but we ended up going in different directions, and I thought, “all that is going to go into a drawer”.

So I decided to do it myself, literally approaching people with my clipboard and asking people, “Do you like tea and would you like to come to my house?”

It [the business] didn’t come from a love of tea, but a love of developing brands, and the love of tea has developed over the past four or five years.

You’re talking about branding – what is it about Madame Flavour that works?

There’s clearly a personal touch and care that is unusual in a supermarket brand, and I think it’s very feminine which is also quite unusual.

In developing the brand side, in the course of that consumer research I came across a pyramid-style brand which hadn’t been launched in Australia.

Because tea is so competitive I thought, “Where is a gap?” It’s women that drink specialty teas, but most brands are pretty functional, like Lipton, Twinings, Dilmah – you know, colonial, male branding, so I saw an opportunity there.

On the product side, I learnt that over the past 50 or 60 years or so in Australia people moved from drinking loose tea in teapots to tea bags, and saw a real nostalgia for that.

Of course, now there is no time because everyone’s so busy. So the pyramid – or the infuser pod – provides the convenience, but you can also see what you’re drinking, and it’s quite beautiful.

So you’re offering speed and aesthetics. 

Yes, that’s right.

You talked about women – do they drink more specialty tea or more tea in general?

Women drink more speciality tea, so green tea, Earl Grey, English Breakfast.

It’s funny – a guy from one of the groups said, “I’ll drink anything with a string on it”, and there’s definitely a group of women who want something special.

You were able to sign a deal with Woolworths quite early on, how important was access to Woolworths for the business? 

Oh, it was essential. Firstly, because of my background, I had always dealt from a marketing perspective with the supermarkets. I wanted to build something of a certain scale and it’s what I knew.

My first presentation was to Woolworths, and that’s also what’s quite different about us. People see it and think it’s a speciality blend found in speciality stores. But price-wise it’s $5.29, which is a lot more than the everyday products but quite a lot less than you pay at specialty tea retailers.

And are you the first of its kind in that market, between everyday tea and specialty tea retailers?  

We’re the first of the kind to not have tea bags; I think that’s what makes it special. We’ve never done paper tea bags.

But are you seeing people mimic you?  

Not yet. There’s been a couple of launches into the pyramid style by larger brands that weren’t successful, but right now no one else is doing pyramid. But overseas it’s more common.

You mentioned supermarkets were critical when starting out – are you concerned about being overly reliant on them, particularly as they are pushing their own products? 

I have tried to diversify the business. We do have a food service business which supplies to hotels, cafes, Virgin airlines, and this trip [to France] is exposing us for the first time to the global market. We’ve had interest from all over the world in the past five years – it’s unlimited and very exciting.

You’re talking about export opportunities?   

Yes, the people coming past are distributors or direct buyers from large groups which could supermarkets or gifts stores or anything like that. We have approaches from Costa Rica to the UK, the US, Russia, New Zealand.

Your teas combine leaves from Sri Lanka, for example, with Australia lemon myrtle leaf. Will that translate overseas and is that Australians prefer teas with local ingredients? 

The way the blends have been developed is I’m quite particular in nominating where the ingredients are coming from, so if we end up in other markets we’ll start highlighting that more.

For example, the lavender we use is French, so we’ll be more specific about that. I think people genuinely like to see ingredients that relate to their own country.

But I think Madame Flavour is a firmly global brand – there are aspects from all over the world.

Personally I have a love of Australian native foods – I have a piece of land in Gippsland, and have got involved in local food groups and organising a grower forum, so there’s a natural interest in using native ingredients when they fit. 

So I assume when you export, you’ll be incorporating local products into those products? 

We’ll keep the range as it is but be mindful when developing new blends to use ingredients native to that environment, so for example for New Zealand, there are blends that use manuka honey.

And when you were starting out, what challenges did you face? Was financing an issue? 

Absolutely. It’s a family business that wasn’t exactly planned and went from marketing to six months later me saying, “Honey, I’m thinking of starting a tea business, what do you think about that?” Financing has been a challenge to manage and also how to manage growth carefully.

And going to supermakets without scale; actually that probably was good in some ways but it leaves you vulnerable. Getting in is one thing, but staying there requires a level of sales, marketing and advertising, so that was challenging.

Managing the supply side was also challenging; I actually go to Sri Lanka two or three times a year. And work/life balance – I have a five-year-old and a husband.