It’s tea picking season in southern China. On Anxi’s green hills that tea is picked inn often unseen labour. Women spend long, physically demanding days sorting through leaves and harvesting buds. Molly Tea (茉莉奶白) has chosen to highlight these tea-picking efforts in its latest marketing campaign.
Rich Tieguanyin, the brand’s new product, takes centre stage for the campaign – a short film titled Flowers on the Hat. Travelling to Anxi, where the tea is grown, Molly Tea puts the daily work and the women themselves in front of the camera.
We see the character of tea picking women in small details: floral decorations, butterfly pins, expressions of determination. The film also draws on the local Minnan dialect, where suì (水) is used to describe something beautiful to paint the women as figures of resilience and vitality.
Molly Tea have used this kind of imagery before. In those cases tea-picking tended to be more of a design choice, sort of the way a dairy company might use images of rolling green pastures.
But this time Molly Tea is taking more of a social welfare track. In conjunction with Flowers on the Hat with Molly Tea has launched a Spring Tea-Picking Women Health Support Initiative (春季采茶女工健康守护行动). It works in partnership with a volunteer center in Xiamen to offer medical assistance and essential supplies to workers during the harvest season. The brand says updates on the initiative will follow.
The Dao view: Molly Tea tea-picking support needs legs for the long term
Molly Tea’s campaign reveals a wider shift in how origin stories are being told. As discussions around supply chains and labour conditions become more visible on platforms like Rednote (小红书), brands are starting to place greater emphasis on the people behind production. Look to Mixue’s recent campaign of agri-support or the rise of fair-trade products in the Chinese market for examples of this.
By pairing its film with a welfare initiative, Molly Tea extends the campaign beyond visual storytelling into a concrete narrative that can evolve over time, rather than ending with a single piece of content. Whether this approach develops into a longer-term commitment will ultimately shape how the campaign lands, and the legs it’s got to keep running in future.
