What this site is for
tea.equipment is a focused catalogue of the tools used in gongfu brewing — gaiwan, teapot, cha he, cha hai, kettle, cup — with a working bias toward Yíxīng (宜兴) clay and the small workshops that still throw it by hand. We are not trying to be a department store. We are trying to be the shelf you walk to when you already know what tea you brew and you want the right vessel to brew it in.
The site does three things. First, it sells equipment we have personally handled, with material badges, capacity in millilitres, and care instructions written by the person who tested the piece. Second, it publishes long-form material on clay — origin, ore type, firing, seasoning — at /guide/yixing and in the artisan profiles. Third, it links outward, because no single shop should be your only source. If we do not carry a thing, we will tell you who does.
What we refuse to do is almost as important. We do not invent provenance. We do not call a slip-cast pot fully hand-thrown. We do not photograph in warm filters that hide clay colour. We do not run countdowns or scarcity banners. Every listing has a real photograph of the actual piece or batch, a stated workshop and region, and an honest note on what the piece is good for — and what it is not.
We also care about repair. A teapot that has served you for ten years and lost a lid is not garbage. The /guide section includes lid-matching, kintsugi referrals, and seasoning recovery for pots that have been stored badly. Equipment is a long relationship, not a transaction.
Finally, the mission is editorial. Every product page is written by a human on the team, signed, and revised when we learn more. If a vendor stops meeting our standard, the listings come down. If we are wrong about a piece, we say so on the page where we were wrong. That is the bar.
How the site started
tea.equipment began as a spreadsheet shared between four colleagues who could not agree on which gaiwan to recommend to a new student. One of us preferred 110 ml thin porcelain for green and yellow tea, another wanted a heavier 150 ml for yán chá (岩茶), a third only used a zhū ní (朱泥) pot. The spreadsheet became a Notion page. The Notion page became a small set of product pages on shop.thetea.app. By 2024 it was clear the equipment side needed its own home — different photography, different sourcing partners, different cadence — and tea.equipment was carved out of the constellation. The first standalone catalogue went live with 48 SKUs across six categories. Today the catalogue is larger, but the editorial rule has not changed: nothing goes on the site that someone on the team has not brewed with.
Where the pieces come from
Our clay sourcing is concentrated in Yixing (Jiangsu) and Chaozhou (Guangdong), with porcelain from Jingdezhen and a small line of cast iron from Yamagata. We work directly with workshops where we can — usually small studios of one to six people — and through two long-standing brokers for pieces we cannot reach in person. Every artisan we list has a /artisan/[id] profile with their lineage, the ore they prefer, and the firing temperature they target. Where a piece is workshop-assembled rather than single-hand-thrown, the listing says so in plain language under the material badge.
We pay in advance for kiln runs we have committed to, which means our catalogue moves more slowly than a marketplace. A duàn ní (段泥) order placed in spring may not arrive until late autumn. We think that is the correct speed for clay. If you want next-day shipping on a generic pot, that is a different shop, and we will happily point you to one.
Inside the constellation
tea.equipment is one site in a larger family run by Teamotea — 36 connected projects covering encyclopedia, shops, education, sensory work, and community. The encyclopedia at thetea.app explains the teas you will be brewing. The course library at tea.school teaches the gongfu method our equipment is designed for. shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app stock the leaf itself. tea.travel maps the regions our clay and our tea come from. The cart on this site is shared across the shops in the constellation, so a Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) order from shop.thetea.app and a 120 ml zhū ní (朱泥) pot from tea.equipment ship together when possible. The point of the constellation is that no single page has to do everything — each site can stay narrow and good at one job, while still belonging to a coherent whole.
Transparency, in practice
We publish margins on house-branded pieces in our annual report on teamotea.com. We disclose when a product page has been updated, what was changed, and why. We link to outside reviews of our own pots, including the critical ones. When a customer reports a defect, we add a note to the listing of that batch — visible, dated, signed.
None of this makes us special. It is the standard a serious craft shop should meet, and we are trying to meet it. If you find a place where we have fallen short, write to the team email on the contact page and the correction will be made publicly, on the page where the mistake lives. That feedback loop is, in the end, what holds the catalogue honest.