Bespoke "Floating" Tea Organizer

Project Summary

This is a Tea Organizer I designed for my workplace (a coffee-shop/performance venue) to simplify finding teas and keeping inventory. The tea is kept in mason jars with custom magnetic lids that attach to metal shelves in the design.

Motivation

I designed this tea organizer to solve the following issues we had with our previous method of organizing teas, which was keeping them all in a drawer behind the counter.

• No way to locate a specific tea quickly
• Constantly rotating stock meant always updating menus
• Rotating stock meant if menu wasn’t updated, every bag of tea had to be checked to make sure a tea was out of stock
• Opaque tea storage bags meant you couldn’t take stock of remaining tea at a glance

Ultimately, I’m happy with how the final product solves all these issues! The organizer is kept on the counter, where staff and customers can see it. Each mason jar says the type of tea, and is transparent so it’s easy to see how much is left, and when it’s empty you can just place the jar in the drawer that we used to keep tea in. There’s no need to have a menu when the teas themselves are on display, which saves time for everyone. And the teas are organized (by caffeine amount, another bonus to this system) so that finding one is simple.

Design

The main body is a walnut frame with dovetail joinery, and the back is a plywood with walnut veneer which slots into a routed insert in the frame. There are metal shelves running across the frame that are press fit into the body and live in small divets made in the sides of the inner frame by a biscuit joiner.

The tea is kept in mason jars with custom 3D-printed lids that have magnets sealed into them with epoxy so the teas stick to the shelves. It took a lot of iterations and types of magnets, but the jars have a really satisfying stick and are both secure when attached and easy to remove. Each shelf fits 4 jars comfortably, and 5 jars with a tighter squeeze.

Aesthetics

The solid walnut (with dovetails!) is sanded past “smooth” territory and into “soft” territory, and combined with a wipe on poly finish it is dare I say gorgeous. The unfinished steel shelves give it a little funky aesthetic flair, and the final look, with duct tape labels on the tea jars, looks right at home at my work.