Nobody Is Shopping for Your Tea Towel

In 2023 I sat down to write the product description for a tea towel I had spent three weeks illustrating.

Here’s what I wrote. 100% cotton. 50 x 70cm. Hand-illustrated in London. Machine wash at 30oC.

That was it. Every word was true. And none of them explained why anyone should buy it.

I had described the object perfectly. I had never, however, considered the occasion.

And that was a product development mistake I had made months earlier.

Where the story actually starts

We hear the word “storytelling” being thrown around a lot these days. It’s usually treated as a marketing strategy considered after the product exists. Build a personal brand around it. Make the Instagram captions more emotional.

But the story isn’t supposed to begin when the product is ready for sale. It has to begin when you decide why the product should exist.

Imagine a Christmas collection. Before anyone sketches a robin or a snow-covered cottage, someone has already decided the collection launches in October, sells for six weeks, is bought mostly as gifts, and competes with every other Christmas kitchen textile on the market.

Those decisions come first.

People do buy tea towels. But almost nobody is buying a decorative tea towel for the obvious reason you need one, drying dishes.

They’re buying a Christmas gift. Or they’re decorating the kitchen for the holiday season. Or they’re replacing the tired festive towel that comes out every year. Or buying a Secret Santa gift for a colleague.

The artwork on the tea towel exists to serve the occasion. That’s what the customer is paying for. And creating that narrative around your product is the reason why they should buy your £16 tea towel, instead of a set of 4 from IKEA for £3.

You’re selling a feeling in someone’s kitchen. Not a piece of cotton to dry dishes.

My version of that

I sold 15 tea towels out of the 25 I had produced.

I knew about gifting dates. I spent my entire career in fashion working backwards from Christmas and Summer drops. You learn early that the season a customer buys in has almost nothing to do with the season you're designing in.

But when it came to creating my own range, I just wasn’t thinking about the customer at all. I was thinking about whether the work was good enough. I wanted people to see the collection and understand that I could illustrate, and design a range, and get it produced properly. The tea towel was a piece of evidence in an argument I was having with myself.

So I never asked what else was going on in my customer's head. Any tea towel already solves the drying problem. So does an old T-shirt. What a nice tea towel solves is something else, and each of those somethings belongs to a different person buying at a different point in the year.

The occasions I never wrote down

People do search for illustrated tea towels. That traffic exists, and it isn’t small.

I assumed people would search for an “illustrated tea towel”, and that if my SEO were strong enough, mine would be near the top and the artwork would do the rest.

But people are shopping for something else entirely.

The housewarming. Someone is going to a housewarming party on Saturday afternoon and they don’t want to turn up with wine like the other four guests. They’re not shopping for a tea towel. They’re shopping for something for a kitchen, at roughly £20, that doesn’t look like it came from the local off licence.

Seasonal decoration. My mum does this. So do all my aunts and probably most of my cousins. Their tea towels change with the seasons. Flowers for Spring, bunnies for Easter, lemons and ice cream for Summer, pumpkins and apples for Autumn, snowy scenes and Christmas motifs in Winter. They redecorate a room for £18 and ten seconds of effort.

The school end-of-term thank you. A parent buying for one teacher and two teaching assistants in the last week of July, with a budget already fixed in their head before they start looking, and a strong preference for something that isn’t a mug.

The one that never gets used. I have five tea towels hanging on a rail in my kitchen, three of them my own design. None of them has ever dried a dish. They are there to be looked at, functionally a small textile print, and I would be mildly annoyed if someone wiped a hob with one.

The first home. Someone furnishing their first flat, buying in sets, matching to a colour they’ve already chosen for something else.

Same product. Five buyers, none of them thinking about drying dishes.

I had written for none of them.

Because I had only imagined one customer. Someone who loved my illustration as much as I did.

Why this is a range decision

The interesting part is that every one of those occasions changes the product itself.

Seasonal decoration means Christmas artwork signed off in June, manufactured over the summer, launched in October to a selling window of about six weeks before it becomes dead stock for eleven months.

Gift buying changes the packaging — a custom band, a sleeve that matches the artwork, something that demonstrates how special that product is.

Teacher gifts change pricing. Parents likely buy more than one which means a budget for three rather than to a single unit. If you’ve only produced singles, you’ve excluded every buyer that wanted to buy more than one towel.

The customer buying as decoration means a hanging loop and how the artwork looks when the tea towel is folded over a rail rather than how absorbent the fabric is. Absorbency is irrelevant to a customer who never intends to wet it.

Decisions like MOQs, artwork briefs, packaging specs, production windows, photography, are made based on when in the year stock has to be on a shelf. All of it flows backwards based on which occasions you’re building for. By the time twenty-five tea towels are sitting in boxes under your desk, it’s too late.

Trust me on that one.

Which is precisely what I got the wrong way round. I designed what I wanted to illustrate, produced it, and then went looking for reasons someone might want it. The reasons should have come first.

You can’t have all five

Once you can see the occasions, the temptation is to build for all of them. Christmas and housewarming and teachers and the new-home list, those can fill the entire calendar.

Commercially, it’s a trap.

Imagine three designs for each occasion. That means 15 SKUs to plan, design, sample, produce, photograph, create content for, list and launch. Ordering 25 units per SKU means 375 tea towels, at roughly £7.50 per unit landed, that is nearly £3,000 invested in stock before you sold a single unit.

Pick two occasions. Design for them properly. Because the occasion you choose is choosing your calendar for you.

Seasonal products come with fixed deadlines and dead-stock risk. Evergreen occasions like housewarmings demand a base range that’s always available.

Those are opposite operational models and trying to run both from day one usually means doing neither particularly well.

The better question

There’s another reason the occasion matters.

Christmas tells you when someone is buying but not why they’ll choose yours.

Everyone sells a Christmas tea towel. John Lewis sells one. Tesco sells one. So does every independent maker at every craft fair in the country, in the same six weeks, to the same people. The occasion tells you when to be in front of someone. It doesn’t tell you why they’ll choose yours.

That’s the work the narrative does, and it’s why desire-based products need stories in a way functional products don’t.

Nobody needs a story to buy a mop.

Which brings me back to 100% cotton, 50 x 70cm, machine wash at 30oC. Every word accurate. But none of it tells you the reason the product existed.

More importantly, I hadn’t built the range around that reason either.

Because the question is what occasion this is for, and the answer determines almost everything that follows. The artwork, the colours, materials, packaging, photography, the launch date, stock levels, production schedule and retail price.

By the time you’re writing the product description, all of those decisions have already been made.

Mine hadn’t.

I had designed the tea towel first, then went looking for a reason someone might want it.

Week 43 of 52. I write about product development, operations, and the decisions that make or break product businesses.

If you can only name one reason someone would buy your product, that’s usually the conversation worth having — reply to this email.