---
title: "Du Guoying of Xiaoguan Tea: To Bring Chinese Tea Back to the World, Simplify the User Experience"
description: "Du Guoying, founder of Xiaoguan Tea, shares insights on tea, Chinese tea, and Xiaoguan Tea's design philosophy. He argues that Chinese tea's problems stem from a lack of standardization and branding, and that simplifying the user experience is key to making Chinese tea appealing to younger generations and the world."
author: "New Distribution"
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published: "2018-01-08"
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# Du Guoying of Xiaoguan Tea: To Bring Chinese Tea Back to the World, Simplify the User Experience

> Du Guoying, founder of Xiaoguan Tea, shares insights on tea, Chinese tea, and Xiaoguan Tea's design philosophy. He argues that Chinese tea's problems stem from a lack of standardization and branding, and that simplifying the user experience is key to making Chinese tea appealing to younger generations and the world.

Source: Zaijiu (ID: xingshu100)
Du Guoying
Founder of Xiaoguan Tea
Hello everyone.
Tea is a very common thing for Chinese people. But when it comes to details, if you ask if they really understand tea, I think many people become less confident. Over the past five years, our team has visited almost all the core tea-producing regions in China and developed our own understanding of tea. Next, I want to share three parts with you:
  * **Tea**
  * **Chinese Tea**
  * **Xiaoguan Tea**
What is tea? A beverage. What else should it be? Chinese tea. What are the problems of Chinese tea today? I will share "What is tea" through the overall design thinking of Xiaoguan Tea.
These are China's top ten famous teas, and you may have an impression of their shapes.
These are the tea liquors of different teas; their shades vary greatly.
I remember the first time I went to a tea mountain, I thought black tea grew on black tea trees, pu-erh on pu-erh trees, and green tea on green tea trees... In fact, the trees themselves are not very different; before deep processing, they are all green leaves. Of course, different teas have different health benefits.
What is tea?
**Tea is a magical leaf.** Over thousands of years of history, this leaf has become different teas in different historical periods for different reasons. Most importantly, Chinese tea was an accidental discovery. So **how was tea discovered?**
  * **Black tea**
In the Tongmuguan area of Fujian, due to war, the green tea that was made was not processed in time. When they returned, they found that the green tea had transformed into what is now the prototype of black tea. Unwilling to discard it, they tried roasting it over fire, and it tasted good, thus becoming black tea.
  * **Oolong tea**
How was the shaking process discovered? It was because tea pickers used to carry bamboo baskets on their backs. As they moved up and down the mountain, the shaking produced a special aroma, which became the shaking process for oolong tea. Again, an accidental discovery.
  * **Pu-erh tea**
Historically, pu-erh tea was green tea cakes. To facilitate transport to Tibetan and pastoral areas, green tea was pressed into cakes. But during transport and storage, chemical reactions occurred, giving us today's aged tea and ripe tea.
So, **Chinese tea is an accidental discovery**.
At the same time, **tea is also a record of lifestyle**.
Everyone knows that Japanese drink matcha, a method introduced to Japan during the Tang and Song dynasties. The way Chinese people brew tea today began in the Ming dynasty. In the earliest times, tea was boiled, like cooking vegetable porridge, with salt, seasonings, and rice. Our current brewing method has changed continuously over thousands of years. Today, there are several important ways of drinking tea globally: **British afternoon tea, Japanese matcha ceremony, and Chinese kung fu tea**—these are the major schools.
Finally, we say **tea is also a healthy "drug"**.
As you can see, tobacco, alcohol, and tea all come from plants: tobacco is leaves, alcohol is a deep-processed product of fruits, and tea is also leaves. What do they have in common? They are addictive substances. Once you drink them, you get hooked; once you have the good stuff, you can't go back. They are highly addictive. So we say tea is a magical leaf, tea is an accidental discovery, tea is a record of lifestyle, and tea is a healthy drug.
What are the problems of Chinese tea?
**There is a classic saying in the Chinese tea industry: 70,000 tea companies are no match for one Lipton.** China is the hometown of tea. Why does this situation occur in the Chinese tea category and market? We say it's a common sense issue. When ordinary people mention tea, apart from daily tea and very low-end tea, they have no clear price perception in their minds. Companies lack strong product brands. Investors, the financial industry, and capital have almost zero contact with the tea industry.
So, **what is tea in the minds of young Chinese people?**
First, it's seen as rustic; drinking tea is too low-class. Second, in the office, if anyone from the post-80s or post-90s brings a teacup into the office, they are considered old. When it comes to drinking tea, people shy away. Why? It's troublesome, too fussy, and tea prices are confusing. Of course, sky-high priced teas are also common.
Regarding brand awareness, we say West Lake Longjing. Whose is West Lake? It belongs to Zhejiang. Whose is Longjing? It belongs to the Zhejiang provincial government. **These are product and category brands, but there are no real companies or strong product brands.** Yunnan Pu-erh, Wuyi Mountain Dahongpao, and Anxi Tieguanyin are not product brands but category and origin brands.
The Chinese tea industry currently has a market of 36 billion yuan, but the top 100 companies account for less than 10% of the market share, indicating extreme fragmentation.
In our view, how do we see this tea?
**In Chinese life, there are three types of tea: firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea; tobacco, alcohol, and tea; and music, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, and wine.** These three teas are different. The bottom one (firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea) is agricultural tea. The middle one (tobacco, alcohol, and tea) is consumer tea. The top one (music, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, and wine) is cultural tea. In fact, from a market and brand perspective, consumer tea is more like branded tea, agricultural tea is bulk tea, and cultural tea becomes enthusiast-level tea.
**China is the hometown of tea, but most people don't understand it well.** Conversely, consumers have no obligation to understand tea; brands should use their professional expertise to tell consumers the truth. Why don't most people understand? Because before the 1980s, Chinese tea was under a planned economy, regulated like cigarettes today, with state monopoly on purchase and marketing. But after 30 years of opening up, we feel **it still remains in a relatively agricultural mindset, lacking full baptism of intensification, standardization, and branding.** Intensification mainly refers to upstream planting, standardization to the middle processing end, and branding to the downstream commercial end.
Xiaoguan Tea's Design Thinking
What Xiaoguan Tea wants to do is create a modern Chinese tea. What is the difference between its overall design thinking and traditional tea?
**All tea consumption boils down to three scenarios: buying, drinking, and gifting.** "No standard" is the biggest confusion when buying. At tea markets, you don't know whether the 500-yuan, 5,000-yuan, or 50,000-yuan tea offers the best value, nor which suits you. When drinking, it's still complicated. When gifting, the biggest confusion is "no price." When you choose a gift brand, most have clear price tags, but tea is weak in this regard. We address these three issues starting with product design.
When Chinese people brew tea, they often grab a handful and put it in a cup. This is unhygienic and careless, but everyone is used to it. **We tried to create a better packaging method that is portable, hygienic, and easier to preserve.** After a year of repeated experiments, we fixed the force to tear open each can at 18 Newtons, with just the right tension and opening force.
The biggest confusion in the past was tea cost. How to **identify tea?** After about four years of running around, I summarized **three elements for judging tea**:
  * **First, scarcity of origin.** Today, Laobanzhang in Yunnan Pu-erh is very popular. Tea from Laobanzhang village is definitely expensive, while that from neighboring villages is much cheaper.
  * **Second, picking standards.** Whether it's one bud and one leaf or one bud and two leaves, the uniformity of buds and leaves greatly affects cost. With the same farmers, land, management, and picking, different yields can lead to several-fold differences in cost.
  * **Third, complexity of processing.** Traditional green tea processing is relatively simple, requiring only a few steps of pan-firing. But the later roasting process for oolong tea is very complex. We finish making tea in May, but it can't be marketed until September. Because it needs to be roasted once a month, then stored to reduce the roast, repeated three or four times before it can be sold. Different processes lead to different costs.
Using these three standards to examine any tea, you can quickly judge its cost.
**For most consumers, more choices mean no choice. We hope to simplify consumer cognition through unified standards.** I don't understand tea myself. With hundreds of choices in a tea shop, how do we choose? Xiaoguan Tea offers only one choice: you just pick the type of tea you want to drink; weight, grade, and price are all the same. We use unified small cans, weight, grade, master, and price to make consumer choices simple. **Traditional tea may complicate simple tea**, using information asymmetry to make money. But Xiaoguan Tea uses professional expertise to present complex tea simply to consumers.
For tea products, we aim for standardized design to simplify user cognition. For tea ware, we do lifestyle design to adapt to different consumption scenarios. So, as I said, Chinese tea is an accidental discovery, but Xiaoguan Tea is definitely not accidental; it's all intentional design.
**If today's young Chinese don't accept Chinese tea, how can the Western world drink Chinese tea?** We must make tea modern and youthful, fully integrating with modern life scenarios. Then our post-80s, post-90s, and post-00s young people can all enjoy a cup of Chinese tea they like, and the opportunity for Chinese tea to go global will come.
Design Thinking Drives Innovation
Tea is a representative of Chinese culture and a calling card of China. **Our vision is to bring Chinese tea back to the world.**
Doing good design and innovation is truly not easy. If a product is complex for users, it must be due to the simplicity of designers and engineers. **The complexity behind the product is what truly makes users simple and provides a good user experience.** The complexity behind the product requires the joint efforts of the company, engineers, designers, and all relevant professionals. Once all difficulties are resolved, the moment it is presented to consumers, their experience should be pleasant.
Finally, I want to talk about narrow design thinking and broad design thinking.
In the business world, besides product design, marketing models and industry chain models also need design, just expressed in different ways in different vertical directions. **Our past understanding of design thinking may have been too vertical in professional directions.** When applied in the business world, we can view it more broadly.
I once read Kenya Hara's "Designing Design" carefully. After reading it, I remembered one sentence: **Design serves needs.** I think design is born for needs, and design will continuously change the world. In my personal experience, design will be as important as technology. In the next 30 years, design will be a very important force driving the Chinese business world.
Thank you.
Source: Zaijiu (ID: xingshu100)
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