Numi Organic Tea

“We kept pitching the idea that what's happening to coffee is going to happen to tea. So that The connoisseurship and kind of the gourmetship of, if that's a word, of coffee is going to happen to tea. So we're just going to ride that wave.”

“There were years we were growing 40, 60, 70%, but at this time, as we were maturing a little bit, and we were probably north of 20,000,015, twenty million, those kind of growths became a lot more challenging. Then, well, there was the 2009, 10 recession. Where…”

“And so one of them was this dry desert lime that we drank as kids called Numi Basra, and, you know, that we'd always talked about in the family, somebody should import this tea. ... And I was like, okay, that's what I'm going to do.”

“When Numi Organic Tea was launched in 1999 by brother and sister Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani, their prices were five or even 10 times higher than what people were used to paying for tea bags.”

“Cafes, restaurants, hotels, Ritz-Carlton's and Fairmont hotels, and all the fancy places, and department stores, so that would be specialty, but food service picked up really quick. That was actually the majority of our business in our first year and a half to…”

“Our dad kind of bailed us out on several occasions because summers were really tight, tea season isn't until the fall, and you have to buy all your teas in the summer, so he would bail us out with his pension plan”

“Yeah, we were already probably north of four and a half million by year four, and we were probably taking two to 3000 a month of salary.”

“Even though it still doesn't perform that well, 20 years later, we would never get rid of it.”

“It was actually a great opportunity for us, because coffee roasters and the food service didn't want to support necessarily Starbucks, so they wanted who's the new kid on the block, and Numi was a great fit, so we actually were able to take advantage of that o…”

“And it was right around then that we had a lot of cash cause we raised about five million. And then we raised about, you know, five years later, twenty five million to take out some investors.”

“I would say over a 100,000 when we look at some of the chains that we got in, like Sur La Table and Neiman Marcus and Cost Plus and Rainbow. I would say over a 100,000 for that year.”

“Yeah, they did make a hard offer.”

“About 10 years into the business, we were able to kind of get a lot more solid and create a profitable EBITDA.”

“When we raised that 25, 15 years into the business, we were able to finally take out our dad's million dollar working line capital”

“We went to our dad and asked him if he would use the leverage of his house to get a loan. So we partnered with a bank in Cleveland and he refinanced his home and he had a line of credit on his home up To X amount, but we just started with a 250,000 dollar line…”

“Walmart wanted us in year seven, eight, you know, Trader Joe's wanted us in year two, Target wanted us when we were young, and we kind of said, oh, we're not ready for them yet.”