Christelle Young has been the managing director of boutique tea brand T2 Tea for about a year and she has already overhauled the management structure, closed several under-performing retail stores and cut redundant items from the product line. With 62 retail outlets across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, T2 Tea sells a variety of specialist teas and a range of colourful and appealing teapots and cups, and offers in-store tea-tasting.
When Young joined T2 in mid-2024, the company had been suffering “quite significantly” for some time, she says. There was a call for change and although T2 is still evolving on her watch, Young says it had its best profitability results in over 12 years in its last financial year, which ended in December.
She leaned into transparency when she first joined the company, telling employees T2 was in financial trouble and substantial change was on the way. “When I came in, I didn’t hide any of these problems,” she says. “We shared them. We tried to make sure that everyone felt empowered to help solve them and that everyone was part of the solution too.”
The staff wanted to pitch in, Young says. “That was really big, being open and honest about what’s going on, where we’re at, what our plans are, in detail, and giving them clarity on that path forward.”
The winner of the Australian Financial Review’s Women in Leadership award in the Retail, Hospitality and Property category, Young has degrees in information technology and business analytics, 20 years’ executive experience, and an employment record that includes a position as chief data and analytics offer at L’Oréal and interim leadership as GM of Finance OTC at Toll Group.
She says she is driven by the numbers – the performance numbers, the productivity numbers, the profit numbers. “I’m a big believer that we can be smarter with what we do; why wouldn’t we work smarter and not harder?”
T2 was founded in Melbourne, sold to Unilever, and in 2022 sold on as one of the 35 Lipton Teas and Infusions brands to the CVC private equity group. Young reports to the Lipton Board and CVC to win approval for T2’s key strategic plans. The company differs from the other brands in the Lipton Group, and sits outside that tea ecosystem, Young says. “T2 has a retail presence,” she adds. “We don’t sit just in a tea market. We sit in a gifting market. We’re a lifestyle brand.”
When Young began at the company, the T2 range had too many products, too much choice, she remembers. “For example, T2 used to drop newness in every month, whether it was a new teapot range, or new teas, kind of like a fast fashion brand,” she says. “We stripped that back to focus on our core range and just on key moments that matter: Mother’s Day, Christmas, a birthday.”
To help re-energise T2, Young has recruited a new executive leadership team and she has also benefited from the knowledge and experience of her network of professional contacts. “It’s amazing how much I’ve tapped into my external network, particularly in the early days when I was resetting the team,” she says. “I strongly believe the importance of that network. It’s where I get a lot of ideas. It’s where I bounce ideas. Having a close, transparent network that gives you really raw and honest feedback has really been quite close to a lot of my success.”
As well as transparency and simplicity, Young also believes in speed – speedy decisions followed by speedy action. “Let’s not go talk about this and have round tables about this and have board meetings that go and go on and on and on,” she says. “Let’s move at speed.”
Once their minds were made up, Young and the T2 executive team moved fast, even on the toughest decisions – such as closing a store. “If you let that fester in the system and people talk about it, the worse things like that get, so if you’re shutting down a store, once you make that decision, just go and execute,” she says. “It’s like ripping off a Band-aid.”
Those quick and data-driven decisions and actions led a “new energy” at T2, Young adds. She told T2 staff why and how the decisions were made and why they were necessary. “We really backed it, saying: ‘these are the stats, and this is what it means for the business, and it’s a great thing for the business’,” she says.
She used the analogy of the tea plant to help explain her decisions. In tea plantations the tea plant is a waist-height bush, she says, but in the wild it can grow into a 30-metre-tall tree. “But that’s not where you get the value in a tea plant,” she says. “You get the value from pruning it and enabling new growth and new life.”