The China Experts: Daniel Poppleton of Whittard of Chelsea on Building a Tea Brand in the Home of Tea
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Daniel Poppleton, International Director at Whittard of Chelsea. Whittard sells premium tea, coffee and hot chocolate, and China is its largest market outside the UK, which means the headline is faintly absurd and entirely true: a British company has built a tea brand in the home of tea. Daniel has spent seventeen years in Asia across three retail brands, and the conversation is unusually practical about how a brand chooses markets, where its data actually comes from, and how the economics of live streaming have shifted.
Who is Daniel Poppleton?
Daniel Poppleton is International Director at Whittard of Chelsea, a role he has held for three years from a base in Hong Kong. He first moved to the region in 2007 with Monsoon Accessorize, with a brief to build the Asia business, and spent 2010 to 2012 in Shanghai running the China operation. From 2012 to 2019 he was at Cath Kidston, back in Hong Kong on a global brief. In total that is seventeen years in Asia, roughly fourteen in Hong Kong and two in Shanghai.
What this episode covers
Why a regional role sits better in Hong Kong and a China role sits better in Shanghai
How Whittard picks markets, and the compliance rules that rule some of them out
Mature market or immature market, and how he decides
The London store data that told them China would work before they entered
Where competitive and consumer insight actually comes from, including one very loud trade show
How live streaming economics changed in three years
Moving from a pure e-commerce play to wholesale and physical retail
What he would tell anyone thinking about the region
Seventeen years in Asia, and why the base matters
Daniel's answer to the Hong Kong versus Shanghai question is refreshingly unideological: it depends on the brief. Shanghai made sense at Accessorize because the focus was China, and it was a complicated brief at that, since the company bought back a nascent franchise, reversed its own decision to license the market, and then absorbed that team into a local one to build the business out through physical stores. For a regional role, Hong Kong wins on the simple grounds of getting from A to B without a two-hour trip to the airport.
His observation about the two cities is the sort of thing you only get from someone who has lived in both. In Hong Kong you barely need to ask what somebody does, because it is finance or law. In Shanghai the expatriate set spanned hotels, automotive, retail and property, all trying to break into the market at the same time, and what struck him was how similar the foundational challenges and successes were across all of them.
That franchise buy-back is worth pausing on, because it is a route many brands eventually take. Moving from a licensed partner to running the market yourself means an entity that can trade, employ and hold the contracts, which is what China company registration delivers, and it means absorbing or rebuilding a team, which is a recruitment in China exercise before it is anything else.
How Whittard picks its markets
The principle is to follow scale, and the reality is messier. Japan is the largest prize and not a straightforward market to break into. Korea, when you boil it down, is a Seoul story. Their biggest partner market in Asia outside China is Taiwan, which Daniel says plainly should not be the case, and which he uses as a benchmark: if we can do this in Taiwan, look at what Japan or Korea ought to deliver. Below that sit Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia.
What stops them elsewhere is category-specific and easy to underestimate. Korea and Japan are the toughest on compliance, largely around ingredients, and Korea adds packaging rules that constrain how much of a product can be packaging, which is a real problem for gifting ranges. Thailand and Indonesia are hard for different reasons, and in Taiwan and Indonesia the obstacle is duties and quotas designed to protect domestic tea and coffee industries.
Vietnam is the interesting omission. Daniel has done it before at Accessorize and Cath Kidston in small volumes, and describes it as a Ho Chi Minh City story with a Hanoi overlay, but he struggles to see true scale. His framing is the one every expanding business eventually faces: you cannot do everything, and with private equity owners the choice between making China and Japan work properly or opening Vietnam is not a difficult conversation.
Mature market or immature market
Kristina raises a debate Woodburn has been having internally: do you enter the developed markets, or the ones that look like China did twenty-five years ago and grow into scale? Daniel's answer is that you pick your poison, and his analogy is a brand new shopping mall against an established one. In the new mall you get the best pitch, but you wait for the traffic. In the established one your competitors are already there, which is a cost, but it is also evidence. If nobody is in a market, think carefully about why. Benetton and Mango could afford to be first movers and plant seeds; a business of Whittard's size cannot, so the proven markets have been the safer route.
The data that said China would work
The decision to take China seriously was not a leap of faith. Whittard has flagship stores in Covent Garden and on Oxford Street, Regent Street and Buckingham Palace Road, all of them in heavy tourist traffic, and it can read the nationality of card transactions. That, plus staff who could engage with customers and report back, showed Japanese, Korean and Chinese shoppers buying consistently.
His advice from that experience is the most transferable thing in the episode: before you spend anything on awareness, look at who is already buying from you without you having chased them. It is cheap, reasonably reliable early market research, and it works both offline and from where you are already shipping online orders. What they were selling into that demand was not just tea but breadth, quality, and a slice of heritage, since the company dates from 1886 and is approaching its 140th year. Where heritage is the differentiator, protecting it matters, and because China grants rights to the first party to file, trademark registration in China is not something to leave until the brand is visible.
Competition, price gaps and the product calendar
The challenge Daniel points to is not geopolitics, which he says has had no direct, tangible impact on the business. It is what is happening next door: domestic competition. There are a great many Chinese tea brands who know exactly what they are doing, and the question any incoming brand has to ask is whether what it already is, unchanged, is enough to win in China. He adds a sharper follow-up, which is who gets to define winning: scale, profitability, or a volume number by a date.
International businesses are not structured the way local competitors are. A local business is built to serve a Chinese customer and nothing else, while an international one carries everything happening in the rest of the world, so a price differential usually exists. His view is that you have to be able to validate it and tell a story that explains who you are and why the price is what it is.
The other adjustment is the calendar and the palate. Earl Grey and English breakfast are not necessarily what the customer wants, and a December Christmas push matters less than what you have for Chinese New Year or Mid-Autumn.
Where the insight actually comes from
Daniel's answer is deliberately a bit of everything. The Tmall reporting suite gives visibility of the competitive set week by week against last year, which is genuinely useful because it turns anecdote into quantifiable context, though he notes wryly that the competition sees the same about them. Customer service calls surface some of it, though those tend to be about availability rather than taste. Once a year they survey their own base by SMS with a small voucher attached, and with roughly 800,000 people in China who have ever bought from them, even a thousand responses is a credible pool.
And then there is getting out there, which he thinks nothing will ever replace. Whittard has been in China for eight years as an almost purely digital business across Tmall Global, Tmall and JD, and to build a wholesale channel it had to start doing trade shows. Its first was FHC in Shanghai at the end of November, and Daniel's account of it is the best passage in the interview: loud music, shoulder to shoulder, and, because China lets the public in, consumers arriving with one and two litre flasks to fill up with hot chocolate until the team had to politely intervene.
What that chaos bought them was insight they could not get online. Almost everyone in China has drunk black tea. Far fewer had drunk flavoured black tea, and English Rose, which is both a best seller and about as British as a product can be, genuinely surprised people. Eight years of e-commerce data had not told them that.
Managing head office
The recurring internal challenge is expectation. Daniel reaches for a British sitcom line about how this time next year we will be millionaires, which is roughly how China gets discussed when a large population number is in the room. His counter is to dampen it and replace it with an understanding of complexity, journey length and scale. Nobody would run a single strategy for Europe, so why run one for China.
The visit problem compounds it. Senior people come to Shanghai, are impressed, and quietly conclude they have seen China, when Shanghai is not China and there are dozens of cities of comparable size. Even the practicalities differ: the temperature range from Harbin to Hainan changes what you range and how you plan. His summary is that a unique market needs a unique solution, and a cookie-cutter approach imported from smaller markets will not survive contact with it.
He also flags a challenge that has followed him through every company he has worked for, which is getting home-market support functions to understand why international needs things differently and earlier. Stock has to be on the water in time for the Singles Day window; that timeline sounds alien to a team working to a domestic cycle.
Live streaming economics have shifted
This is the section with the clearest numbers behind it. When Daniel joined, Whittard secured Austin Li for two or three slots, and a five-minute appearance would sell roughly what the brand sold in a quarter. Crucially, they made money, because the deal structure, the commission and the expected discount still allowed it.
Three years later the arithmetic has inverted. Expected discounts are substantially deeper, commissions have risen, and platform charges sit on top, so there is very little left. The channel went from volume that generated profit, to volume at roughly break-even, to nothing, and is slowly coming back on terms that favour the streamer rather than the brand. He also notes the structural gap: below the very top names there is a middle layer, but the difference in scale is enormous.
Where the attention is going now is micro and nano influencers, people with small but genuinely loyal followings, who can be engaged on a fixed fee, on product, or on commission only. His observation on format is worth noting too: consumers may not want a polished studio live stream at all, and authenticity and conversation beat production values.
From pure digital to multi-channel
Eight years in, Whittard is moving deliberately beyond e-commerce. Wholesale means selling a curated set of perhaps ten or fifteen best sellers to premium food retailers who reinforce the brand rather than dilute it. Physical retail, whether a store or a pop-up, is about something digital cannot do, which is taste. The Covent Garden store has twelve tasting stations and works as a shared experience, people telling each other to go and try something, and that is the missing piece in China.
He is candid that this is also risk management, because a purely digital business has all its eggs in one basket. Even so, they are selective: Pinduoduo was considered and rejected as too discount-heavy for the brand, while Douyin is somewhere they want to get better because it drives engagement and influence.
Any of this expands the operational footprint. Wholesale and physical retail mean people on the ground, which is a employer-of-record question for brands not ready to incorporate and a cloud payroll services question for those that are.
What has worked
Daniel's proudest point is the one in the title: Whittard has built a tea brand in China, sustainably, over several years, and without it costing an arm and a leg. The live streaming era left a legacy too, because a product Austin Li used in his early streams remains a best seller, which cuts against the usual complaint that live-stream buyers are loyal to the streamer rather than the brand.
Hot chocolate has been the other winner. Whittard carries fifteen hot chocolates alongside more than a hundred teas, and in the Singles Day events before the difficult year it ranked among the top three chocolate brands on Tmall, at a price that is not the cheapest and is defended on quality and breadth of flavour.
What he would tell anyone considering the region
Come and see it, because Asia is not one place. Hong Kong is different from Shanghai, Shanghai from Beijing, Beijing from Chongqing, and reading about it is not a substitute. Be clear on the plan of attack before you go: what the model is, whether it runs through partnership, and what the financial expectations actually are.
And do not rush. Eight years in, Whittard is still predominantly tier one and has only just started on wholesale, and Daniel is comfortable with that. His closing caution is about the opposite risk. Build a five-year plan for China and the projection becomes exciting to the point of being frightening, because if the scale arrives you need the infrastructure and the supply base to meet it. Knowing whether you could is a question of cloud accounting and financial reporting that is current enough to plan from, and of the tax and audit discipline that keeps a growing entity out of trouble.
Watch the full interview
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