Each tea pinned to a board with its colours

Why this shop looks like a forecasting board

A trend board exists to hold one idea next to its evidence, and that is exactly what a tea needs: the dry leaf, the liquor colour, and the range those two sit inside. The swatches are physical cloth rather than printed rectangles, because a colour behaves differently on a woven surface than it does on paper, and tea is bought by people who look at both. Handwriting is left in place because a board is working material, annotated as it is assembled, not a finished poster. Numeric codes under each chip make the colour repeatable by someone else, which is the same reason a tea carries a harvest date and an altitude. Paper is deckle-edged and warm so that the pale greens of a spring tea have somewhere to sit without turning grey. Nothing is centred perfectly, and the staple stays visible, because the board is meant to look assembled rather than designed.