Tea blends built for a moment of calm
Plum Deluxe blends loose-leaf tea in Oregon. Founder Andy Hayes started with a travel blog, after trips through Scotland and the Netherlands, and turned it into tea. Today they sell direct, run a tea club, and wholesale to gift shops, cafes and specialty stores, many of them on Faire.
The core book had a team. The quiet tail had no one.
Plum Deluxe's own team works the active Faire accounts. 900+ of their 1,000+ stores in their Faire book had ordered before, then gone quiet.
- A long tail gone dark. About 490 days, on average, since those stores last ordered.
- Close to zero. The quiet book sold almost nothing from February to May 2026.
- Stale contacts. Years-old emails and numbers. The agents added or fixed 172 contacts in month one just to reach people.
On the dormant accounts, before Opener started:
“They probably will never come back.”Andy Hayes, Plum Deluxe, July 2026
An AI agent on every quiet store
In June, Plum Deluxe handed Opener its 900+ quiet Faire accounts. Each one got its own agent, with our team reviewing every message before it goes out.
- Wins back quiet stores. Faire messages, emails and calls to stores that stopped ordering months or years ago.
- Switches channels when one is dead. One buyer's email was dead, so the agent moved to Faire Messenger. The store reordered the next day.
- Writes to one store, not a list. Each note is written for that store. Andy: “these are much more impactful than the broadcast messages.”
Stores they'd written off are ordering again
revenue from the dormant stores they handed over
Jun 2026 vs prior 6-month avg
stores back after 90+ days quiet
Jun–Sep 2026
of them had been quiet over a year
Jun–Sep 2026
In month one, their core Faire book, which Opener didn't touch, held its trend at +7%. Ten of the revived stores have already ordered more than once.
