Nevadan at Work: Tea industry official sees expansion brewing in coffee, craft beer

George Jage looks at his computer, a large bottle of Advil sitting on a table nearby.

He smiles, then tells a tale of an India-based company that submitted its tea to his annual tea competition. The fourth-generation tea estate was planning to fold because the family couldn’t afford that life anymore. They won the contest, though, and were able to get better prices for their tea, thus making it possible to keep their farm open.

“There’s this huge exponential factor of people you get to help and influence their lives in a very indirect way,” Jage said.

Jage is founder and director of World Tea Media and the Healthy Beverage Expo, both at the Las Vegas Convention Center through today, open to industry only. He’s expecting around 220 exhibitors covering 30,000 square feet and about 4,500 attendees.

His World Tea Media is responsible for the World Tea Expo, an annual tea competition, an online newsletter, website and news site. Jage is looking to mimic that model with the Healthy Beverage Expo, the first incarnation of which is playing out this weekend.

In the next three years, Jage said he could expand into coffee or craft beer “pretty aggressively.”

In January 2012, his company was acquired by F+W Media, but the terms of the transaction were not disclosed. F+W media does about $180 million a year in sales.

Jage came to the convention business almost by accident.

After college he struck out to help his father, Bill, with his apparel liquidation business, which eventually led him to working the Offprice Show, a convention for the secondary apparel world that his father co-founded.

“We built the company up into an 85,000-square-foot show twice a year here in Las Vegas, plus two regional shows in the New York market,” Jage said. “By 1999, we sold to a company called Tarsus PLC, a U.K. company.”

Jage stayed on as a contract manager for Tarsus for two years after that.

In 2002, he moved to Las Vegas from Milwaukee because he had a large network in the city. Initially, he imported patio furniture from China and consulted for another apparel show. Then a friend’s wife asked whether there was a show for tea.

“I started looking at the opportunity and I saw there was really an underserved market there,” Jage said.

He brought the couple on as sweat- equity partners and bought them out in 2005.

Question: How did World Tea Media fare in the recession?

Answer: We obviously took a big hit in 2009 and 2010, 2011. I felt we really stabilized the business by 2010. Smaller businesses, the advantage is we’re more nimble. The disadvantage is that we have a very limited portfolio. We have the one event per year and when we saw 30 percent of our revenues disappear, it was a very difficult time.

Question: What’s new as a result of the acquisition?

Answer: Going through the acquisition process gave us access to capital. I was very selective in companies who we decided to work with. F+W’s leadership is a gentleman who I’ve known for a long time in the industry, David Nussbaum. He used to run the company that ran Natural Products Expo and he really gets it. He keeps the businesses operating independently, very entrepreneurially. It took all of those cash concerns, administrative paperwork, accounting and finance and human resources — all those things that a small company can’t really have really robust solutions for — and gave us that opportunity.

Question: Why add the Healthy Beverage Expo?

Answer: I’ve kind of painted myself in a corner with the World Tea Expo because we’re serving such a vertical market. The decision was made a long time ago, by me, to be in the trade-show business or in the tea industry. If we’re in the trade show business, we should look at trade show opportunities — anything that we see available. If we’re in the tea industry, we should look at every type of opportunity from a media standpoint that we can deliver to the tea industry. We really stayed focused on that path, but it’s also an Achilles heel. It limited our ability to grow because it’s a finite universe.

Question: What’s next for your shows?

Answer: What I want to do is create a strip mall of beverage events to have that horizontal value for bigger buyers. Somebody like Kroger (Co.) wouldn’t normally come to our tea show, but is coming this year to Healthy Beverage and the Tea show because there’s more value. For them to fly all the way out to Las Vegas and come to a tea-only show when they’re buying for tea, coffee and across a broader grocery category, it just makes more sense.

Question: Why didn’t you finish your master’s?

Answer: I wasn’t going to learn this at school. My great-grandfather was a Lebanese immigrant who had a barber shop on State and Wabash in Chicago. My grandfather had his own retail store selling suits and ties, and then my dad had his own business twice. I just feel that it’s just, you either are willing to be that type of risk taker or you’re not. I’ve always been willing to take those risks.

Question: Why get out of the apparel show business?

Answer: The apparel people, it’s an old-school group of people that would sell their mother for a dollar. They live and die by the deal. It’s in their DNA to negotiate everything and that can be exhausting when you’re trying to run a show.

Contact reporter Laura Carroll at lcarroll@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4588. Follow @lscvegas on Twitter.