The Lilac Festival 2023

What an experience. I’m grateful to Carino for allowing me to participate independently as ‘sommerier’ while they all worked their asses off. The night before I spent nearly 4 hours preparing 60L of tea, 40L of which was used! I left Carino at 2:30am, got home at 3. Slept until 7, and drove back with my daughter to get set up.

My daughter and I had a great time serving all the guests in attendance, and my takeaways from the event are numerous. The experience to work with her, and for her to see me in my element rather than as just a dad means a lot to me. I learned a lot from my colleage Kazuki (with Issa Green Tea) about how to run a successful stall, but it’s a shame that learning these things on the day of is essentially learning the hard way.

I have several take aways that I’ll write here. This is what I learned today:

1. Signage of what you offer, big text is good, and an eye catching display that you can see from half the street away brings a lot of people in. My colleague Kazuki almost always had a 7 person line up for her tea. I stared at that line with envy for 8 hours straight as I ground tea with no customers. There were many onlookers, but its not quite the same thing.
2. Some things are trendy, cold matcha drinks are something people like without even trying it. Esoteric cold brew puerh drinks mixed with kyobancha take actual effort to convince people to try. I don’t regret what I did, I’m proud of it, but it’s an uphill battle.
3. The show matters. When I was milling the matcha I can’t believe how many people stopped to watch, to take videos, etc. I didn’t have any for sale, but if I had some ready I feel I probably could have sold some, if the packaging and size was ‘correct’ — ultimately because it’s hand ground stuff, it’s an expensive product. I went into the day naively thinking that by casually mentioning to the onlookers that they could buy a caddy of this for $350 that someone would be interested enough to join the waitlist to buy one. Didn’t happen. Lesson learned.
4. Doublecheck that you have everything you need. Frankly, this event being on a sunday is probably the worst possible day for me — being that Friday and Saturday are incredibly busy in the restaurant and burnout is as real issue, I didn’t have the energy or time to doublecheck I had everything I needed. I was 99% ok — but the 1% was the handle of my matcha mill. I left it somewhere, probably in the backseat of the car. With no way of getting it, the ‘show’ I had planned for everyone fell apart. I asked Toshi for help, he taped together some metal shelving brackets with the end wrapped in saran wrap. It worked, but man did it screw up my hands after 8 hours of nearly straight grinding. The metal digging into the skin, the angle being bad, I feel it now as I write this and I know it’s going to be much worse when I wake up tomorrow.
5. If I was on ‘team carino’ rather than ‘team sommerier’ and we wrapped everything up together in one package, I think we all would have done much better. Ultimately we all work at the same place, but our table was divided in two. I was happy to help take payments and direct customers towards Carino, but it wasn’t the seamless experience that the guests could have had. I don’t regret this too much (I did well enough to justify my presence) but as the face of carino (as pretentious as that statement is) I do feel that overall it could have been better. It’s something to plan for next year.
6. ‘If you enjoy this enough that you’d be willing to pay, I will gladly accept your payment. I will give this to you for free right now though. Please don’t feel guilt if you’re unwilling or unable to pay’ was the concept of my cold brew tea. This was an interesting one, and actually I’m a little ashamed of myself that I tried this method. It was all from good intentions. I hope no one left with any lingering guilt. I noticed that if anyone knew me, of course they paid. How could they not? Are they going to visit me in a month from now with the guilt that ‘i didn’t pay for Josh’s tea, of course he’ll remember and look at us in this negative way!’ — that was really not my intention, but I feel that’s how it played out. I tried hard to make sure people left my stall feeling good… I don’t know. A lot of people I’ve never met took advantage of this, and the people I knew had to pay the price essentially. I’m not sure it was the correct path, I’ll have to do some deeper thinking on it.
7. Follow-ups and connections: I met a lot of people today. I hope some of them who I had a long conversation with will reach out eventually and we can reconnect, but I feel it’s unlikely. My business card is in their wallet, it’s going to be there for 6 months, then it’ll move to a desk, sit there for 2 years, and then maybe an email will be fired off. I should have been a bit more proactive with an email list sign up sheet, or something along those lines that I could contact these interested people on my effort, not theirs. Next time.
8. Actually consider what my goals are before I start. Today was pretty ‘happy go lucky’ — I brought some tea, I brought a mill, I ground some tea and hoped people would buy stuff that I had for sale — stuff that was totally irrelevant to the ‘matcha show’ — which was confusing and ultimately worked against me. Poor planning.
9. Teaware probably would have sold extremely well in such a setting, but I brought nothing at all. What was I thinking? (I wasn’t)
10. My daughter in a kimono working with me brought a LOT of people to come and chat. My little mascot is a customer magnet. Is taking advantage of this some form of exploitation? Well she said she’d do it for doughnuts. If she’s happy, I’m happy.

Ultimately for me, today was a great success. Could I have done MUCH BETTER? yes, obviously if I really contemplated how an event like this would unfold beforehand and adjusted my plan to incorporate points 1-10 I would have absolutely killed it. Folks, I’m going to kill it next time. Bye for now.