Sit Down With Success is a feature of the Huntsville Business Journal on entrepreneurs and their keys to success. This month’s individual is Connor Knapp and his success with Piper & Leaf.

Two miles past the Tennessee River on US-231S /431S, the new Piper & Leaf headquarters greets travelers with a roadside sign featuring its familiar Samovar logo. At the end of its gravel driveway, the building welcomes guests with raised herb beds and a large, inviting covered front porch with rockers and picnic tables.

Founder and co-owner Connor Knapp comes from a multi-generational military family, all born in different states. He noted that it wasn’t until moving back here from Alaska that his immediate family had ever lived in one city. “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 in hand, I sat down with Knapp for a discussion about 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 [the medical field].

At that point there [were] plenty of medical people in the area, so it was really more about the values that I wanted in my community and in my life more than anything else. It wasn’t financially driven–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 and it’s been really interesting, coming from a military family background, that we’re actually influencing some of the local culture.

Before, we just experienced the local culture and then moved away. It’s really interesting to see how people have associated us with Huntsville culture now. That’s something nobody in our family’s ever experienced and it’s been really interesting to see.

I saw that you faced some legal challenges with your initial branding, which ultimately led to the selection of Piper & Leaf as your company name. What lessons did you learn from that experience?

We learned that in business there are a lot of people who really aggressively seek their own interests. Our business has always been around the values of partnerships, partnerships that mutually benefit each other–we’re much more interested in somebody that’s willing to invest in us and us in them versus finding a few more pennies of profit margin.

We’ve learned over the years that unfortunately there’s a lot of people out there who are out there to get as much as they possibly can.

In that situation, it was three months after we started. We were still, I think two nights a week at farmers’ markets. And we talked to a lawyer, and they said “yeah, you can probably win your case, but it’s going to be the next five years of your life and $30,000-50,000.

We said A: we don’t have the money; and B: That’s not the kind of life we want to live. So we’ve actually had quite a few legal cease and desists or copyright claims which are typically invalid but we just steer clear of those because that’s not the kind of people that we want to be.

We do want to protect our interests but not at the cost of making somebody suffer because of it…we’ve probably hampered ourselves in a lot of ways because we haven’t sought all those opportunities because we asked the question ‘Is this a partnership or is it something where one of us is winning something?’ If the answer is that, then we typically say ‘no, we’re not going to do this’ even if it benefits us.

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 5 gallon buckets about 6 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 ‘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.

Where do you see the company going in the years to come?

Honestly, it’s not too crazy, not too big. We make a five year vision every five years, so our five year vision includes a full time travel crew that goes around the nation. It includes things like providing health care to our employees, which we’ve been able to do already, [and] things like having at least one drive through…we’ve been trying to get a drive through for eight years now.

That’s our biggest goal that we’re trying to achieve because it’s actually a lot harder than you might think to get a drive through…if it’s in a good area it’s so expensive. So, like, any of these stores up the road here, they’re probably paying anywhere from $10,000-15,000 a month in rent, not including utilities. So it’s a big ask. And that’s one thing we want to do.

We’ve been trying to more fully develop our catering program. We’ve got an old farm truck and horse trailer we’re converting into a mobile catering service so that’s going to be really cool. And then we just want to have high quality wholesale relationships like we currently have, continue to develop those, and be recognized as a premium, wholesome product whenever people think about tea.

I see some parallels between your methods and those of Celestial Seasonings with respect to using a lot of locally-sourced ingredients. Roughly how much would you say is locally sourced? [9:57]

We actually a few years ago went to Celestial Seasonings and were inspired by how they started…up until only 5 years ago one of the original owners was involved. Yeah, they started in the mountains, they were gathering herbs, they would hang them in an old barn to dry and they’d sell them at farmers’ markets.

Unfortunately the local health department’s a little more strict these days, you have to go through a lot more hoops to make things happen. But every single one of our teas has something from the local area.

Obviously, we don’t get the tea leaves that we’re looking for from the United States. Those come from places like Sri Lanka, Japan, India, and so we’re importing those tea blends…for example our most popular one, Front Porch Special, is an Earl Grey blend with jasmine and spearmint from our garden. Every single one of our blends is made that way–there’s a good balance of local ingredients plus imported tea leaves, etc.

We do have a few with non-local fruits. That’s just because we can’t get them here, so for example we have a seasonal right now, Sweet Dixie. It’s a blueberry-chamomile pineapple-coconut blend and obviously pineapples and coconuts don’t grow here. But the chamomile and blueberries do.