An early Lipton's advertising postcard; the firm used postcards very effectively to spread the new habit of tea drinking and associate it with its brand of Ceylon-grown teas. Thomas Lipton was colorful Scotsman, who went from running his family's grocery store to a chain of some 300 stories in the 1880s. Towards the end of the decade he got into the tea trade, and after a visit to Ceylon in 1890, he struck business deals with James Taylor, one of the first big team planters in Ceylon to provide the firm with a regular supply. These he offered at reasonable prices to the British working class. Lipton's remains a popular brand in the subcontinent, and is now owned by the multinational Unilever.
Note some of the early brand-building exercises on the card – Thomas J. Lipton's personal signature, the genuine packaging. The wide variety of tea flavor names offering different emotional states and satisfactions remains with us today.