A procurement eye shaped by the tea mountains
Sandry Law didn’t start his career looking for tea pets — he started in the cup. As a buyer for Teamotea’s flagship tea collections, he spent years tasting through the seasons of Yunnan, learning to distinguish a mao cha’s potential from its provenance. That foundation in quality control and direct sourcing became the bedrock of everything he does now.
When the tea.toys constellation took shape, Sandry saw the natural connection between the ritual of tea and the objects that accompany it. A cháchǒng isn’t just a figurine — it’s a participant. Poured over session after session, it develops a patina that records the tea you’ve shared. Getting that object right mattered. So Sandry began applying the same supplier‑audit rigour he’d used for tea leaves: visiting workshops in Jingdezhen, Dehua, and Yixing, learning to read a potter’s hand in the tool marks, and understanding how diferrent clays and glazes respond to years of tea.
Today, Sandry splits his time between Kunming’s tea‑trade districts and the ceramics villages that orbit Yunnan and neighbouring provinces. He is the person who inspects a water‑spitter’s pour before it ever reaches the online catalogue, who verifies a master’s seal against municipal artisan registries, and who decides whether a piece feels right when warm water runs over it on a crowded tea tray. His own tea table at home is populated with a dragon that sprays a thin stream of water at the start of each session, a monk‑child figurine that he’s been feeding shou pu‑erh for six years, and a zisha toad that lives permanently beside his gaiwan.
Sandry also built tea.toys’ authentication flow — the same supply‑chain transparency principles he pioneered for the tea trade now underpin every product page, with master attribution and traceable sourcing. He believes that if you’re going to collect something, you should know whose hands shaped it and where the clay came from. That’s why his signature appears on featured‑lot announcements, a personal guarantee that the piece matches the promise.
Kunming — the tea crossroads where clay meets culture
Kunming isn’t a ceramics capital like Jingdezhen, but it’s the reason Sandry Law can do his work. The city sits at the historical nexus of Yunnan’s tea‑horse trade routes, where centuries of pu‑erh and dian‑hong commerce have created a dense network of tea markets, artisan guilds, and tasting rooms. For a procurement specialist, there’s no better base.
From his office near the Golden Temple Flower and Bird Market, Sandry can reach master potters in Jianshui within a few hours, sampling their distinctive purple‑clay vessels, or catch a flight to Jingdezhen to inspect a new run of porcelain water‑spitters. The tea culture that infuses daily life in Kunming also serves as his testing ground — pieces he sources often debut on the trays of local tea‑house owners before they ever appear on tea.toys. The region’s high humidity and year‑round tea‑drinking make it a natural laboratory for observing how glazes age and how clays interact with different teas.
The Yunnan terroir exerts a subtle but real influence on the objects Sandry selects. The same earthy, mineral‑rich character that defines the province’s fermented teas also shows up in the local aesthetic preferences — darker clay bodies, unglazed surfaces designed to capture tea stains, and motifs drawn from the cloud forests and mythologies of the region. When Sandry curates a water‑spitter shaped like a xiao‑long, he’s choosing a piece that would feel just as natural on a tea tray in Lijiang as it does on an enthusiast’s table in London.