What this is, plainly
tea.money is a pledge platform, not a storefront and not a fund. A campaign opens when a grower has a harvest to press or a cellar has a shelf to fill; backers reserve a portion of it at the field price before the leaves are picked. What arrives afterward is a physical thing — a numbered cake, a wrapper with your name on the inner nèi fēi (内飞), a place on a shelf you can ask to see. There is no share class, no token, no yield curve. If the tea is worth more to someone else in three years than it was to you today, that is a fact about tea, not a return we engineered.
Why the paperwork exists
Every campaign produces the same three documents regardless of size: a pledge receipt naming the harvest and quantity, a warehouse intake slip once the pressing lands in storage, and a plain-language risk disclosure that says, without euphemism, what aged tea does and does not reliably do. We write the disclosure before we write the marketing copy. A grower in Bùlǎng or Fùdǐng sees the same terms a first-time backer in Rotterdam sees — no side letters, no accredited-investor tier. Fees for storage, insurance and handling are shown on the campaign page before you pledge, not discovered afterward on an invoice.
Growers first, cellars second
Most of what you will find under Campaigns is exactly that — a producer’s spring picking, a single mountain, one harvest year, tracked from máo chá (毛茶) to pressed cake. The storage houses under Properties exist because someone has to hold the cake somewhere sensible while it ages, and we would rather name that place, its climate and the person who checks on it than leave it vague. A backer who only wants to support the harvest can take delivery immediately. One who wants to let the cake age can reserve a shelf in Petersburg, Kunming or one of the drier continental cellars — the choice is explicit, and nothing defaults to the longer, more profitable-sounding path.
Who reads a campaign before it opens
No campaign on tea.money goes live without a second read from someone whose job is tasting, not sales. Amgalan Chin checks pressing quality and storage fit for pu-erh and dark tea; Chen Hui Yi does the same for Fuding white tea; Mei Yang for Phoenix Mountain dancong; Hinson Tse reviews every campaign for drinking window and food pairing regardless of category. None of them are paid on commission per pledge — a decision we keep because it is easy to state and easy to check.
What we are not building
We do not run an escrow product yet, and we say so rather than imply otherwise. Producer payouts, milestone-based releases and a formal KYC step are on our roadmap, gated on a jurisdiction decision we have not made — see /disclosure for the current, narrower state of things. Until that changes, a pledge on tea.money is a pre-purchase with a documented paper trail, not a financial instrument, and we would rather be the smaller, honest version of this than the larger, ambiguous one.