Teaspoon

Teaspoon (Teasoon) is a Chinese tea-drink chain founded by Jiang Jiadao that positioned itself in the premium "new-style tea" market with a specific focus on business professionals rather than the mall-crowd chasing trendy brands like HeyTea . The brand's differentiation rested on two pillars: location and product. It targeted white-collar workers aged 25–40 in high-end office buildings and surrounding shopping centers, offering 100-square-meter spaces designed with black-gold and wood elements that conveyed a quiet, upscale environment for meetings—explicitly not a place where customers would queue for 15 minutes wearing employee badges . Its menu emphasized original-leaf teas with minimal processing, priced at RMB 25–35, and the company deliberately pushed a higher proportion of pure tea sales compared to competitors, with fruit tea at 35%, cheese-cap tea at 30%, and original-leaf at 20% as of late 2017 .

The company raised an RMB 8 million Pre-A round in June 2017 led by FreeS Fund, with Weilie Capital and Discovery Ventures participating, following an angel round from CICC Capital in February of that year . At that point it operated three stores in Shanghai, with the first two profitable, and claimed a core user base of 50–100 per store visiting roughly 12 times monthly . By early 2018, Teaspoon had expanded its product line into ready-to-drink energy beverages—"Little Black Can" and "Little White Can"—pitched as a second strategic priority alongside storefront operations . FreeS Fund's early-stage lead Wang Xiaojin framed the bet as a "product plus scenario" play, noting that office-based locations carried lower rent and higher repeat-visit rates than street or mall retail .