From supply chains to tea leaves
Sandry Law never expected to spend his days tasting raw Máo Chá (毛茶) in a Kunming warehouse. His first career was in logistics and supply-chain management, moving goods across continents with clinical efficiency. But during a stint in Hong Kong, a colleague poured him a 2006 Bān Zhāng (班章) that rewired his palate. The depth, the lingering huí gān (回甘) — it wasn’t just flavour; it was evidence of a journey through soil, weather, and human hands. He began spending weekends in Yunnan’s tea markets, learning to distinguish factory from gǔ shù (古树) from garden-grown, and soon realised that the same procurement discipline he’d honed for textiles and electronics could serve tea drinkers in search of authenticity.
In 2018 he joined Teamotea and relocated full-time to Kunming. His role quickly grew beyond buying. Today, as Head of Procurement (China), Sandry oversees every step of the pu-erh pipeline for shop.puerh.app — from building direct relationships with family workshops in Yìwǔ (易武) and Měnghǎi (勐海) to managing the dry-warehouse conditions that allow cakes to age gracefully. He personally inspects every large lot, checking compression, leaf grade, and whether the aroma matches the producer’s claim. He’s the reason our sample sets are split and packed within days of arrival, and why international orders leave with full customs documentation and provenance tags.
Sandry’s approach is markedly unromantic: he believes in numbers, blind tastings, and repeatable quality checks. Yet he’ll also spend an afternoon with a farmer discussing the rainfall pattern that gave a spring harvest its mineral finish. This dual fluency — spreadsheet and gài wǎn (盖碗) — makes him the quiet backbone of the marketplace. When a wholesale buyer asks for a five-kilo lot of 2012 Mèng Sòng (勐宋) with sealed-lot certification, it’s Sandry who sources it, verifies it, and signs off on the sourcing claim. For the retail drinker, his fingerprints are on every sample tin: the handwriting on the batch card is often his own.
The Kunming procurement station
Sandry’s domain isn’t a single tea garden — it’s a 320‑square‑meter facility on the outskirts of Kunming, where the dry, high-altitude air (1,900 m) is ideal for pu-erh storage. The space functions as a cross‑dock between Yunnan’s mountain factories and the world: rough‑woven bamboo tongs arrive weekly from Líncāng (临沧) and Bǎoshān (保山), each tagged with harvest date and plot coordinates. Inside, a climate‑controlled storage room maintains 25 °C and 65 % relative humidity, mimicking the natural ageing conditions of a traditional gān cāng (干仓) but with modern stabilisation.
A separate sample‑prep area is where Sandry’s team splits incoming cakes into 25 g, 100 g, and 250 g retail portions. Every split is performed on a dedicated máng dāo (芒刀) under full-spectrum LED, with the broken leaves sieved out so customers receive intact face‑and‑heart pieces. A cupping table with eight identical gài wǎn and a calibrated kettle serves as the final gate — each lot is blind‑tasted against reference samples from previous seasons before being listed. For international wholesale orders, a packing bench handles vacuum sealing and customs‑grade documentation. The entire station runs on a simple principle: nothing leaves Kunming without passing Sandry’s own sensory and paperwork checks.