Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

One of the intentionally aged teas, Pu-Erh has a loyal following.


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Sep 25th, '12, 22:22
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by TwoDog2 » Sep 25th, '12, 22:22

beecrofter wrote:No, what I meant was all the discussion of price and little on what the tea actually was like as it presented to each of the senses.
As in why not just steep currency and find out if $20's taste better than $5's.
Ohhh, I see.

Well, I can only speak for the Tiandiren teas I have had - maybe a dozen or so. In general, I would say they are lower end teas, some with more depth than others. I think the 2006 Bulang is nice, and strong, with a fair amount of depth and feeling. (considering the price) There is also a TDR ripe cake that I think is quite decent.

I guess the issue of currency only comes up when prices are very disparate for the same tea. Price is always going to be mentioned as a benchmark. Most of the time, if a tea is really amazing, with depth, character, qi, and potential to age, it will not be in the $10 range. So, saying a tea is around $10 says a lot, particularly if that tea is from 2006. I don't think there are many $10 raw puer teas from 2006 that will be amazing, if there are though, i would be happy to buy them!

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Sep 25th, '12, 23:05
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by MarshalN » Sep 25th, '12, 23:05

Agreed - I don't think we're talking about money, but rather how much satisfaction money can buy through tea. If you pay $100 instead of $12 for the same tea, isn't there something wrong?

Sep 26th, '12, 20:38
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by beecrofter » Sep 26th, '12, 20:38

Nothing wrong until you discover the difference in price and build resentment over the desire for a different past.

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Sep 26th, '12, 21:51
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by TwoDog2 » Sep 26th, '12, 21:51

beecrofter wrote:Nothing wrong until you discover the difference in price...
I disagree. I think a lie is a lie, whether it is discovered or not does not impact its wrongness.

Seems that we have gotten a bit farther away from tea misrepresentation and a bit closer to Ethics 101.

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Sep 26th, '12, 22:25
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by chrl42 » Sep 26th, '12, 22:25

See how the atmosphere is different from China..in China, the buyers right is completely ignored. To buy the tea at fair price or not is completely buyer's property, seller has no reponsibility on it whatsoever. I think Taobao was the first that tried to demonstrate buyer's rights, no? :P

The possibility is that seller bought that tea at unfair price in the first place as well, it happened in Korea numerous times before. How often do you think those sellers in Insadong visit Yunnan dealing the price face-to-face locally? :P

This is not to side with that seller, never.

Possibility 2# is Taobao one is a fake (obviously I dunno the current price of that cake..)

Sep 26th, '12, 23:49
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by hster » Sep 26th, '12, 23:49

chrl42 wrote:
Possibility 2# is Taobao one is a fake (obviously I dunno the current price of that cake..)
You can do a Taobao search on Tiandiren to see most Tiandiren does not go for much but you can see twodog's statement about burger and fries.

Forgers do not bother with Tiandiren. See MarshalN's response to David Duckler:
http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=228801
marshaln wrote:
In addition, factories like Tiandiren or Yongming simply do not have anybody who would want to fake them, for simple economic reason - the effort spent is not worth it, when there are much more lucrative things to fake, such as Dayi. These things are low cost, low priced offerings of inferior quality.

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Sep 27th, '12, 00:59
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by MarshalN » Sep 27th, '12, 00:59

TwoDog2 wrote:
beecrofter wrote:Nothing wrong until you discover the difference in price...
I disagree. I think a lie is a lie, whether it is discovered or not does not impact its wrongness.

Seems that we have gotten a bit farther away from tea misrepresentation and a bit closer to Ethics 101.
I think anything up to about 4x the base cost of the tea is fair game. There are real costs to running a business, so if you buy a tea at $10 and resell it for, say, $40, that seems to be fair to me, especially if you factor in things like the costs in between (foreign exchange, shipping, etc etc). Paypal or credit card charge alone is 3% of the total sale price, so out of that $40 $1.20 is going to the payment processor, more if it's a foreign buyer. Those things do add up.

Sep 27th, '12, 03:28
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by slurp » Sep 27th, '12, 03:28

MarshalN wrote: I think anything up to about 4x the base cost of the tea is fair game. There are real costs to running a business, so if you buy a tea at $10 and resell it for, say, $40, that seems to be fair to me, especially if you factor in things like the costs in between (foreign exchange, shipping, etc etc). Paypal or credit card charge alone is 3% of the total sale price, so out of that $40 $1.20 is going to the payment processor, more if it's a foreign buyer. Those things do add up.
I'm sure just a few days ago you made a post setting your opinion of the upper limit of fair game at 3x cost MarshalN. How quickly it changes when you start to sell tea (without any hint of provenance I might add)

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Sep 27th, '12, 03:35
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by MarshalN » Sep 27th, '12, 03:35

slurp wrote: I'm sure just a few days ago you made a post setting your opinion of the upper limit of fair game at 3x cost MarshalN. How quickly it changes when you start to sell tea (without any hint of provenance I might add)
I might have said 3, the point still stands, no?

Provenance? I made it pretty clear what's going on. There are only two or three outfits in Hong Kong that do these things. If you want to figure out who it was, it's not very hard. If you don't even know who they are, then me telling you where it's from is pretty much meaningless to you then, no? I did promise the owner I won't associate his name with the teas. I'm not going to jeopardize my relationship with him.

You're free to think what you want, but I could've started selling teas many years ago - lots of people have asked and I've always said no. Why wait 6 years and do it in such a way as to minimize my profit? I could've doubled the size of the offering and made it 70 spots so everyone gets one after I've seen the initial response. I could, right now, put up 100 cakes of a tea I've found that's cheaper and better than 90% of what you can find on the internet and still make good money doing it. If you really think this is all about $$, then I'm clearly a pretty stupid guy for leaving money on the table. Let me know if you've figured out that part of the logic, please. Or better yet, if you can offer folks what I'm proposing with my samples, by all means, do it. I'd love to give it a try.

Sep 27th, '12, 03:52
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by slurp » Sep 27th, '12, 03:52

Whether you could make more money or not is pretty meaningless. The fact is that this is your first, and in less than a week your opinion of fair game has shot up another 100%.

If it's not about money, care to share the price you bought it for?

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Sep 27th, '12, 04:46
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by MarshalN » Sep 27th, '12, 04:46

slurp wrote:Whether you could make more money or not is pretty meaningless. The fact is that this is your first, and in less than a week your opinion of fair game has shot up another 100%.

If it's not about money, care to share the price you bought it for?
Do you ask this of every vendor you buy things from? Do you need receipts to prove it? Who are you anyway? You ask a lot of questions while giving very few answers yourself.

I can tell you that the price I'm charging is a bit more than 2x my cost. Satisfied? Of course, you can choose not to believe me, but I don't have receipts to prove my case since I never asked for one, so at some point, you just have to trust my word. Or not, in which case, why did you even bother asking?

Sep 27th, '12, 05:08
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by slurp » Sep 27th, '12, 05:08

Receipts aren't necessary, but this little 'educational' exercise is netting you over US$900 in profit - it's hardly insubstantial. One must wonder if it really isn't about the money why you need to profit from it in this way at all.

You seem rather defensive. Do you think it's unfair that these type of questions are asked of you?

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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by MarshalN » Sep 27th, '12, 05:46

slurp wrote:Receipts aren't necessary, but this little 'educational' exercise is netting you over US$900 in profit - it's hardly insubstantial. One must wonder if it really isn't about the money why you need to profit from it in this way at all.

You seem rather defensive. Do you think it's unfair that these type of questions are asked of you?
Actually, it's not defensive, it's because you are making insinuations that are rather offensive. I didn't even include costs of business like paypal fees, exchange rate differences, and other nickle and dime costs in my calculation just now, so your $900 figure is actually off. Do you ask this of every vendor you buy things from? If not, then I do wonder what your motivations are in asking them of me. I'm pretty sure I have been more open about my cost basis than most vendors, so far, in public. Or, if this is public information freely available for all parties, do point me in the right directions, please.

In my original posting on the samples I made it clear to everyone that I'm charging for time and effort as well, so nobody is paying for this under the false assumption that it's at cost, unless they didn't read that part, but I cannot control what people do and don't read on a page. If people don't want to participate, they're free not to. No one is forcing anyone into parting with their money. Do you mean that I should only sell at cost? Is my time and effort worthless? What, pray tell, is a fair price?

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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by TwoDog2 » Sep 27th, '12, 06:03

Regardless of 3X or 4X , the difference is not that big, when you are discussing 10X or 15X. Also, products vary for any business. Margins of profit are not some black and white situation in any venture.

If you have product that is difficult to come by, and you are selling it as what it is, and people line up out the door to buy it, I don't see a problem.

The problem comes when 1st the tea is being sold for 10X their market price (If there are 10 other vendors with identical tea, selling it for 1/10th of the price) and 2nd, and more importantly, the tea is being clearly misrepresented. If you sell tiandiren bulang and call it some rare and precious old arbor limited production, that is just selling snake oil. If you say, "I am going to make what I think is an educational flight of Oolongs, and this is what it costs to participate" and people are lining up out the door, what is wrong with that?

Also, Slurp, not sure what you are arguing exactly? You want him to tell you his costs or something? What website/vendor/business/person would list their costs on a public forum? I can't think of many. You should contact Adagio's PR department and ask them to list their base costs publicly. I'd be curious to see their response

Sep 27th, '12, 10:52
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Re: Breaking the Ceiling for a 06 Bulang

by dzrogers » Sep 27th, '12, 10:52

Apples and oranges.

Marshall is aksing 2x cost while verdant is asking 10-15x cost. Marshall is offering several different roastings of the same tea from a local business. In other words four 25g samples for $10 each and one 50g sample for $20 inclusive of shipping costs. In other other words, at the going rate for such things. Verdant is using fancied up language and slight of hand to sell cheap pu at outrageous prices. There's orders of magnitude of difference here.

Slurp, Nice try at hemming Marshall up, but you are making yourself look like a fool. Best quit while you're only slightly behind. :roll:

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