No, Louise Allen didn’t say if she’d ever put lipstick on a teapig. She did, however, offer an honest reply when I asked her why she’d named her London company “teapigs” :”So people like you ask that question”. 

 Allen was one of a thousand or so exhibitors at last week’s Speciality & Fine Food Fair trying to entice buyers from delis and emporia throughout the UK. Besides fighting for recognition and precious retail shelf space, Allen and entrepreneurial tea ladies like her were also battling an old-fashioned image: Tea time, to stylish Britons under 40, is apparently no later than 1977.

 So although the new tea ladies were eager to educate, praising the virtues of their gourmet teas while turning their refined noses up at PG Tips, Tetley and Typhoo, they needed to grab the attention of the latte generation first, hence “teapigs”.

Kristian Blomqvist may be “pioneering a new tea culture committed to luxury, beauty, health and balanced living”, to quote her website for emeyu teas (London). Yet she concedes the buyer at Harvey Nichols was sold by virtue of her original packaging, especially the four-volume library of teas that so impressed that noted tea authority Claudia Schiffer: “The emeyu tea library is fantastic”, gushes Claudia in a website testimonial.  Neither she nor the Harvey Nichols buyer noted if emeyu’s fine Chinese white and green teas actually cleared their minds or enriched their spirits, as advertised.

To market Brewhaha teas, Glasgow’s Joanne McLeod searched on-line stock-photo libraries for something distinctive that could make her teas look young and trendy.  She selected and cropped around the head and neck of a now camp figure of a platinum blond from a 1950s advert for Playtex bras. It’s an odd choice if your goal is to update your image. Still, if “Butty”, as McLeod named the unidentified Playtex girl, proves to be a success, Brewhaha teas will have locked up the crucial Jayne Mansfield-Judy Garland demographic.