WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

In this new monthly feature, we'll be catching up with merchants that we'd featured in our “New Catalogs” or “New Web Catalogs” department in the past. Kicking things off: TeaLuxe.

Catalog then: Launched in September 2000, the catalog of gourmet tea accessories was featured in the January 2001 issue.

Since then: TeaLuxe, which started as a tea café in Cambridge, MA, in 1996 and launched a Website in 1999, stopped mailing the print catalog in 2003. “When we moved online we started to focus more on café operations in our retail environment,” says corporate director Chris Goodfellow. “Then it just made sense to put the catalog online.”

Today: Web sales account for about 10% of overall revenue. At its peak in 2002, TeaLuxe had eight retail locations; now it has three shops: the original in Cambridge; one in Providence, RI; and one in the Back Bay section of Boston. The company, which moved its corporate headquarters to Franklin, MA, in 2002, recently sold two franchises, which are scheduled to open in Tampa, FL, and Phoenix this year.