A COFFEE WITH ... CHARLA ADAMS AND HAPPY MERCADO

Sweet Leaf Tea team makes use of everything from tweets to ACL tunes

By Kaitlin Ballard
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, October 01, 2009

The foyer of the Sweet Leaf Tea headquarters has many things. A refrigerator stocked with almost all flavors of the naturally sweetened tea, the original plastic bottles from the company's 1998 birth, a small couch for visitors (and employees), and then there it is, written in bold black letters on the wall: "What We Believe."

It's a poignant, bulleted salute to what Sweet Leaf stands for. In no particular order, the first one states, "We create products that our family and friends will enjoy." Second, "We believe that the greatest rewards come to those that embrace risk and follow their vision with passion." And then there's the fifth one, which could easily be the motto for the office atmosphere, "We believe in laughter, high-fives and good music." It's the latter part that is especially relevant as Sweet Leaf gears up for its eighth Austin City Limits Music Festival.

I sat down at the headquarters with two key players, Happy Mercado and Charla Adams, who say they've been planning for this year's festival since the end of last year's.

"ACL is definitely our pinnacle marketing event," Mercado said. That's because the "backyard festival," as they call it, was instrumental in getting Sweet Leaf's name on the map in 2002.

Co-founders Clayton Christopher and David Smith happen to be good friends with the three Charlies of C3 Presents, the festival's promoters. When they were asked to sell their product the first year, they hardly expected what happened. They were prepared to sell 5,000 bottles. By midday, they were driving back and forth to their North Austin warehouse to get more tea. Now, Sweet Leaf is more than ready for the festival.

"We have truckloads upon truckloads of tea," Mercado said. To explain the volume he's talking about, he came up with an analogy: "Prepping for ACL is like preparing for war, like consumer guerrilla warfare. It's just absolutely intense, but once it's actually going, it's so much fun."

ACL is where many people first learned about the company, which started as a small production out of Beaumont in the 1990s. Over time with the help of investments, especially the March announcement of $15.6 million from Nestle Waters North America Inc., Sweet Leaf has made a dent in the ready-to-drink tea industry.

Despite the recent investment, Sweet Leaf speaks for itself. "From a music festival standpoint, I would say that it's more Sweet Leaf's branding coming through. Nestle Waters is opening more doors through distribution of home deliveries, office deliveries," Adams said.

Social networking also plays a big role in Sweet Leaf's aim of getting their tea "past people's lips," as they say. Fifteen employees from different departments update their Twitter accounts under @sweetleaf followed by their name: for example, @sweetleafhappy. This is one way they will announce the winner of their text-to-win contest, which begins Friday. They've partnered with Gibson guitars and will give away three guitars in the general admission, VIP and media areas.

"We don't hold back our personality through these Twitters ... We actually put our real lives in there, too, and again, it's the people that make our company. It's our personality shining through," Mercado said.

Mercado, 24, joined Sweet Leaf in January 2007 as an intern while studying marketing at Texas State University. He began working on the field marketing side, and after completing his internship, he was hired as the company's first field-marketing representative for Austin and San Antonio. He now oversees the entire field-marketing department.

As for Adams, 30, she grew up around Sweet Leaf while attending the University of Texas. Before joining the company in June 2008, she worked in marketing communications for a software company and always "believed if you're passionate about a product, your work is also going to show that passion. I've watched the company grow and just decided I really wanted to work there someday and set my vision on it," she said.

Growth seems inevitable for a company that feels like a family. Dogs roam the office, and its cluttered work areas are reminiscent of home. But that will soon change as they gear up to move to the Penn Field complex on South Congress Avenue two weeks after the festival. They're also launching a new Web site today and getting ready to introduce new bottles with 64 "granny-isms."

Look under your next Sweet Leaf cap. The grannies give some interesting but practical advice: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," or "Smile; it makes people wonder what you're up to." Don't forget "Them taters have eyes."