July 2022
3
SIT DOWN WITH SUCCESS
Connor Knapp of Piper & Leaf on Stepping Out of the Cage Sit Down With Success is a feature of the Huntsville Business Journal on entrepreneurs and their keys to success. To read the full story, please visit the Huntsville Business Journal website. Not far past the Tennessee River on US-231S/431S, the new Piper & Leaf Tea Company headquarters greets travelers with a roadside sign featuring its familiar logo. The building at the end of the gravel drive welcomes guests with raised herb beds and a large, inviting covered porch with rockers and picnic tables. Founder and co-owner Connor Knapp comes from a multi-generational military family, all born in different states. “There’s quite a large age gap in the kids in our family so different ones of us lived in different areas and it wasn’t until I moved back that we had all ever been in one city at the same time,” he explained. With a Mason jar of Front Porch Special tea in hand, I sat down with Knapp to discuss the past, present, and future of his company. It had to take a big leap of faith to jump from being a Doctor of Physical
Therapy to starting your own tea business. What was the deciding factor? I did both for quite a long time and it got to a point where I had to decide on one or the other, ‘cause both were taking up too much of my time. You only have so many hours in a week and I valued the ability to work with family and friends and invest in our community, much more at that point than working in [medicine] ... it was really more about the values that I wanted in my community and in my life more than anything else. People think that we’re this huge company that makes millions of dollars…it’s not true. It’s literally all our family walking around here doing things and we make a living–we don’t make a lot but the value is the quality of life and what we’re able to do. When did you realize that Piper & Leaf was going to be a big success? We were having some mild successes at the farmers’ markets. The whole design of the business…focused on compost with tea on the side made from our garden. We had it in little paper bags and
we made a couple gallons of it every week. Long story short, nobody ever bought the compost but they kept buying our tea. It was actually the Madison Street Festival in October of 2013…we had a booth and people were going crazy over it. We ended up with a line about 2½ blocks long. We kept running out and we kept having to run back and make more. We were carrying tea in five gallon buckets about six blocks because you couldn’t drive into the area. And while we were stressed out and trying to fulfill all the needs of the booth we noticed, ‘Hey, these people aren’t upset that are standing here in line for 30-45 minutes. They’re talking to each other.’ That was interesting to see, and it was more interesting to see that people started jumping in to help us be able to serve more customers faster. That’s when we realized that this was bringing the community together; this needs to be a full time business. Because that was the reason we started, to bring communities together. And that’s when we decided,
By Dawn Suiter / Photo by Steve Babin
‘Okay, this is a full time business, we’ll pursue opportunities from here on out.’ What are the greatest challenges you’ve faced since starting your business? One of the biggest challenges my family has faced in starting our business and have had to overcome is sourcing supplies. Both for our locally made tea blends and any other products or services that we use. There is a large gap between retail sources and industrial level sources for supplies. We have had to be creative and form our own network over the years. w
