An old wood-and-iron Chinese tea blender greets visitors to the Bigelow Tea headquarters in Fairfield, Conn. The sturdy machine, the size of a VW Beetle, was the first piece of industrial equipment the company acquired. It aptly symbolizes not the dusty past, but the rugged fortitude required to carve out a future for the 70-year-old family concern.
There’s nothing genteel about the tea business, according to third-generation CEO Cindi Bigelow, 54. To survive in the land of giants where Bigelow Tea competes, the company must be innovative, nimble and focused. She says the company is the No. 1 specialty tea company in the U.S., but its $150 million in annual sales is dwarfed by the billions in revenue generated by the wider product lines of competitors like Unilever’s Lipton, Twinings and Hain Celestial. Even ubiquitous Starbucks fights Bigelow for market share with its Tazo brand.
“We’re the only single-product, family company among them,” Cindi points out. “If they want to gun for a [marketing] program that I launch, they can easily do it with a lot more money.”
Fighting giants has more or less always been Bigelow Tea’s mission. Cindi’s grandmother, Ruth Campbell Bigelow, started the company in her kitchen when her husband lost his publishing job and the interior design business she ran was decimated by the Depression and then by the austerity of the World War II era. She brewed up a blend of black tea, orange peel and spices based on an old Colonial recipe and served it to friends. Family lore has it that the blend generated “Constant Comment,” which is how the company’s first (and still important) product earned its name when the company was launched in 1945. Ruth’s husband, David Bigelow Sr., hand-painted tea tins and sold the product door-to-door.
Their son, David Jr., joined the company in 1949, left after five years to pursue a career in the film business, then returned at his parents’ request in 1959. In the meantime, he had married Eunice, who would serve a vital role in the company’s growth in succeeding years. The couple expanded into other flavored black, herb and decaffeinated teas. David Bigelow Jr. became president in 1963. Ruth Campbell Bigelow passed away in 1966.
Major developments
The big breakthrough, according to David, occurred when Bigelow elbowed its way into mass markets in the 1960s. “At that time in the supermarkets, there was no such thing as a specialty tea,” he explains. “It was all basically black tea in 100-teabag boxes. It was huge when we had 12 inches on a supermarket shelf.” Today, Bigelow’s 120 products are sold in a wide variety of venues, including Walmart, Whole Foods and Amazon.
The other big innovation came in 1978, when Bigelow invested in equipment to individually wrap teabags in foil to ensure their freshness for up to three years. “Introducing the foil package was a big deal. Eunice was instrumental in that,” David says. At Eunice’s urging, “We went out on a limb to buy the equipment.”
Also making the company competitive with bigger players is a single-minded focus on product quality, a tradition handed down from generation to generation. “Bigelow was founded on product ingredient quality,” says Bob Kelly, the company’s non-family senior vice president of sales and marketing. “There is a consistent family culture as it relates to business. Cindi will speak today about product quality just exactly like her mother and father did. She will not cut corners.”
Cindi and her older sister, Lori, came into the business at young ages but followed different paths. Lori, 59, started tasting teas at a young age and served as co-president with Cindi. She now works on the Charleston Tea Plantation, America’s largest working tea garden, which she persuaded her parents to buy in 2003. Cindi worked for Seagram’s after graduating from Boston College, then went on to Evanston, Ill., to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management before returning to the family company as a cost accountant. She worked through every facet of the operation—planning, purchasing, customer service and operations—before she became president in 2005.
Emotional ties
If Cindi Bigelow weren’t CEO, she could easily have a career in television. She is articulate, vivacious and totally relaxed in front of the camera in the videos she makes extolling the company’s products. She has a forthright, capable style like Martha Stewart’s—only with much more warmth. Cindi is exactly the same in person, especially when she talks about her passion for her family’s company.
“Running a family business is very emotional,” she says. “When it comes to the health and well-being of the company, I become a mother lion watching over her cubs.”
That deep emotional tie to the company may be genetic, since her father evidenced it, too. “My father was very passionate about the business. Sometimes too much,” Cindi says fondly. “A family business is like your child. When he was worried, he could be very aggressive in his concerns, but it’s all for the right reasons.”
The change in leadership wasn’t complicated, according to Cindi. “We’re very fortunate. My grandmother had one child and the company passed to him. My mother and father had two children. Lori, my sister, has been in the business for 35 years and did a great job, although she is in a limited role now. There was great simplicity in the passing of the baton.”
As might be expected, though, with such passionate individuals involved, the transition from David and Eunice’s leadership to Cindi’s wasn’t entirely smooth. “There were five years when it was a little rocky,” Cindi says. “Emotionally, you have to respect that the generation passing the baton is going through a lot. Whether it’s logical or illogical, you have to give them their space to process the transition.
“It was difficult because they had it in their mind that when they passed the baton, their life was over,” Cindi reflects. “We tried outside consultants, but in our particular case it made it too impersonal. That was not a good thing, because you couldn’t put a form around the emotional side of it. It wasn’t just checking off things to be done. There was just too much emotion, sometimes about things they didn’t really even want to admit. Love is the only reason we made it to the next generation.”
David proudly points out differences between his style and his daughter’s. “The company is vastly more professional today,” he says. “Cindi is much more thorough. She is well educated, whereas we learned as we went. She’s truly brilliant as a manager. We kind of stand in awe as we watch her operate.”
CFO Don Janezic, a 27-year company veteran, candidly sums up the personalities involved. “David was conciliatory and patient. He was a good listener,” Janezic says. “He had a great counterbalance in Eunice. He was always ready to invest and grow, while [Eunice] was a bit more frugal. He might make a decision, but the two of them would consult and come up with a decision that both were happy with.”
By contrast, Janezic says, “Cindi is more absolute. She is a quick decision maker. She shares the compassion for the employees she learned from her parents. She has the same long-term vision as her father, who was a great visionary. Her parents were a bit more deliberate, while she is a bit more decisive.”
Janezic adds that the transition is ongoing. “David and Eunice are still intensely interested in the business,” he says. “This is their life. It was hard for them to just say, ‘We’re done’ and go off into the sunset.” He points out that the senior Bigelows still come into the office and Cindi, even though she has full management responsibility, keeps them fully informed of the rationales behind her decisions.
New tactics
David introduced numerous product and distribution innovations, while Cindi has taken the company’s battle with the giants to the marketing arena. “As a CEO, innovation is a big chunk of what I do,” she says. “I constantly talk to store owners and customers. I’m always thinking about what we need to do next.” Her tactics include forming unlikely partnerships with the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins and tapping unexpected spokespersons like Joe Torre, Phil Simms and Don Imus.
The company has steadily expanded its product line, too. This year, it plans to introduce organic ready-to-drink tea as well as a new line of all-natural, tea-related products known as liquid water enhancers. “We’re planning to add a new business development manager to the executive team to look at acquisitions, product expansion and finding opportunities to leverage off our name, products and our expertise,” Janezic says.
In addition to innovation, another tenet of Bigelow family ownership is deep concern for employees. The company work force totals 330, with about 260 of them in manufacturing facilities scattered across the U.S. from Idaho to Connecticut. This may not be the most efficient way to operate, according to Cindi, but change is not an option because of its potential impact on the employees.
“There’s something about standing in front of employees and knowing how much they need their jobs—how much they need you—that you carry home every night,” Cindi says. “Being a family company doesn’t mean as much to our customers as I would like it to, but I know it means a lot to our employees.”
Many family companies boast employees who have stayed with them for years, but Bigelow Tea may have a greater percentage than most. “The company has been in business for 70 years and has four major locations,” Janezic points out. “We still have the first employee hired at each of those locations. The very first employee in Connecticut was hired at a very, very young age, and he’s still working part-time in his 80s!”
Janned Serrano, Cindi’s executive assistant, has been with the company for 26 years. She started on the production floor and worked her way up at Cindi’s side. “Whatever they do,” Serrano says, “the Bigelows keep the employees in mind because they know whatever decision they make will affect them. If something is happening with the company, Cindi always tells the employees.”
“Sometimes I’m accused of over-communicating,” Cindi muses, “but the employees are like family, and I want to treat them the same way I would want to be treated if I were in the exact same position.”
The Bigelows hope to keep the company under family ownership for a long time to come. “Anybody who would buy the company would change Constant Comment in a minute, and we don’t want that,” Eunice says. She also points out that Cindi has children and they’d like to keep the company in the family for them.
Cindi doesn’t know what the future holds for her two children, Meghan, 22, and David, 20. “They’re both welcome to come into the company, but it’s entirely their choice,” she says. “At this point, I feel my daughter is going to be looking at a different path that I support 200%. My son is looking at business, and I hope we can be part of his very bright future.” Meghan recently graduated from Georgetown and works for Teach for America, while David has just completed his third year at the University of Virginia.
Cindi appreciates the non-financial value of operating as a family business. “You don’t have to worry about shareholders and analysts,” she notes, “so you can do programs like our ‘Tea for the Troops,’ where we have sent 4 million teabags to our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan for free.” The program uses tea from the Charleston plantation to ensure that the product sent to the troops is 100% American-made.
“The future is more up to Cindi than it is to us,” David says. “When you run your own company, it’s quite a joy.” 

Dave Donelson is a business writer in West Harrison, N.Y., and the author of the Dynamic Manager Guides and Handbooks.
Copyright 2014 by Family Business Magazine. This article may not be posted online or reproduced in any form, including photocopy, without permission from the publisher. For reprint information, contact bwenger@familybusinessmagazine.com.