Our second batch of tea cups are finally finished and available online!   Each cup is carefully handmade in-house by our resident master potter Tim Donaldson. After being fired in the kiln once, the cups are then individually dip glazed before being fired again up to 1200 degrees celsius. Here's the final thing: For our first batch we stuck to black and white, this time around we branched out in a mint blue and Tim got a bit wild with a couple of Japanese inspired cups... We think the final result is pretty epic! The new cups are available from our online shop here ..read more

Classic stainless steel infusers are back in stock! With these babies there's no reason not to drink loose leaf tea — grab some while they're hot ..read more

Head honcho Tim from Informal Tea recently answered this Q&A for The Market NZ and we thought we should repost it here as a little extra insight into how we roll. Enjoy: How long does it take you to make your products? What’s involved in the creation process?  You could say the creation process begins well before we get out hands on anything. From the planting of tea plants a hundred odd years ago. Theres is an amazing amount of history and work that has gone into our tea before we even set our eyes on it. So that’s why we put so much emphasis on working with really great producers wh ..read more

It's that time of year again... the onset of summer and Christmas means a busy new market season and this year is looking bigger and better than ever. We've done a couple of markets already, so lets recap starting with a special edition Little Big Market as part of the Tauranga Arts Festival, which came complete with a bunch of creepy tea taste testers...  And these strange (but hypnotically entertaining) zebra eye things, thanks to the brilliant Freelunch Street Theatre Company from Hamilton...  The regular Little Big Market summer season has started too, with pushing up ..read more

As we wait for our new season green tea to arrive, we thought it might be a good time to have a look at what makes our Pure Green tea oh so special. We've looked at how our organic green tea is grown, and around this time last year we took a brief look at the process of making spring green tea, but this year I thought we could go a little bit more specific and talk about one aspect in particular — hair. When you've brought our green tea, you probably would've noticed all the furry fluff in your bag of tea — this fluff comes from the tiny tea hairs that have fallen off of the dried tea leaves ..read more

Sheesh, what a busy couple of months it's been! We've had our heads down and working hard through spring and now (as usual) we have some great secretive things in the pipeline! For now though, I'm stoked to announce that we've fired up pottery production today and the first of our 2nd line of teacups are starting to take shape (should be ready for Christmas!) It hasn't all been hard work though. Spring is an epic time for harvesting (specifically tea harvesting!). Oranges and Mandarins aplenty. Then you've got fresh flowering Rosemary... And the less common act of picking Rosehips... I li ..read more

This Tuesday we helped celebrate the launch of our new stockiest Paper Plane in Mt Maunganui. It was a massive night where you couldn't even move for the first half hour! We served up a ton of tea, caught up with friends and made a couple new ones. All in all a good night! Amongst the chaos, Tim managed to snap a couple of instagram shots. From the heap of great furniture, gifts, notebooks etc etc, I'd have to say the title of favourite product has to go to local potter Sarah Backler's porcelain cups. They're really really nice, such a good idea, and the cups are so delicately ..read more