Jul 5, 2021 · 1h 9m · how-i-built-this
Numi Organic Tea: Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Siblings Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani transformed their artistic backgrounds and Iraqi cultural heritage into Numi Organic Tea, bootstrapping from an Oakland apartment into an industry-leading, sustainability-driven premium tea brand.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 30.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 4.0 Guest teaching 2.5 Guest disagreement 0.3 Guy pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:02:40 Reframing the grind narrative
Ahmed immediately pushes back against Guy's premise that he is just grinding away, stating firmly that he enjoys his daily life and feels balanced.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 57:21 Challenging growth expectationsGuy interrupts to challenge whether demands from outside investors for 30 to 50 percent annual growth were realistic for a mature beverage business.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 18:59 Demystifying Numi Basra ingredientsAhmed and Reem educate Guy on the traditional Iraqi beverage, explaining that it contains no Camellia sinensis tea leaves at all, but rather pure steeped dried lime.
Guy holds their own ▶ 1:05 Historical analysis of third-wave beverage shiftsGuy displays deep domain context by mapping out the exact parallel between late-90s third-wave coffee roasters and the emergence of organic, sustainable premium tea.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Rise of Premium Beverages in America | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Guy Raz provides a detailed historical monologue setting up the domestic tea and coffee markets, citing industry statistics and macroeconomic beverage trends. | |
| Iraqi Roots, Family Heritage, and Life in Cleveland | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy inquires about family heritage and religious upbringing, while Reem and Ahmed describe their bicultural experience growing up in Cleveland. | |
| Ahmed's Youth, Counterculture, and Artistic Studies | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Guy probes into Ahmed's teenage rebellion and counterculture experimentation, which Ahmed candidly explains as essential to his creative growth. | |
| Reem's Trauma, Physical Recovery, and Return to Art | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy empathetically explores Reem's severe car accident and her subsequent shift away from biomedical engineering back into art. | |
| Ahmed's Bohemian Journey in Europe | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Ahmed recounts his nomadic journey through Europe, detailing how he balanced professional photography with artistic integrity. | |
| Running Traditional Tea Houses in Prague | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Ahmed explains his introduction to the post-communist Prague tea house scene, teaching Guy about traditional European tea culture. | |
| Reem's Career Crisis and the Inspiration of Numi Basra | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Reem and Ahmed educate Guy on Numi Basra, clarifying that it contains zero traditional tea leaves and is made strictly from crushed dried lime. | |
| Synchronicity at the Grand Canyon: Deciding to Partner | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | The founders detail their spontaneous decision at the Grand Canyon to unite their separate concepts and launch a tea company in Oakland. | |
| Mid-Episode Break and Sponsor Message | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy handles the mid-roll transition and asks the founders about their initial operational setup in an Oakland apartment. | |
| Finding a Co-Packer, Calling the FDA, and Sourcing Raw Limes | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Reem and Ahmed describe bootstrapping their packaging and regulatory understanding, including a humorous call to the FDA and finding their Salinas co-packer. | |
| Formulating Pure Single-Ingredient Flavors and Full-Leaf Teabags | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Guy references coffee roasting tasting profiles, prompting Ahmed to explain how tea requires even more nuance and why full-leaf teabags were revolutionary. | |
| Bootstrapping Distribution and Securing Family Financing | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Guy asks about early startup finances, and the founders share how their father leveraged his home equity and pension to keep the company solvent. | |
| Debuting at the San Francisco Gift Show | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The founders describe their debut at the San Francisco Gift Show, where artistic booth presentation and hospitality generated instant major accounts. | |
| Food Service Expansion and Re-Educating American Palates | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Ahmed and Reem explain re-educating consumers away from tea dust and artificial flavoring oils toward steeped, pure whole leaves. | |
| Expanding the Team and the Hain Celestial Acquisition Offer | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | The founders recount meeting Hain Celestial's CEO and receiving an aggressive, high-pressure buyout proposal. | |
| Rejecting the Buyout and Navigating Cash Flow Realities | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy asks whether the multi-million dollar buyout would have solved their financial anxiety, prompting Ahmed to explain their long-term conviction. | |
| Securing Investment and Navigating Sibling Dynamics | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | Guy presses on whether high growth expectations were realistic, while Ahmed candidly discusses sibling friction under severe financial strain. | |
| Committing to Sustainability and Reaching Long-Term Profitability | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Reem and Ahmed detail their dedication to plant-based wrappers, fair trade certification, and repaying their father's line of credit upon reaching profitability. | |
| Strategic Decisions on Expansion and Protecting Brand Integrity | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Ahmed gently refutes Guy's framing that he is grinding away, clarifying that he enjoys his current work-life balance and intentional brand growth. | |
| Reflections on Hard Work, Fortunate Breaks, and Collective Purpose | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Reem and Ahmed reflect on the combination of relentless hard work, timely industry breaks, and maintaining a mission-driven purpose. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Raz: Roughly 80% of US Tea Consumption Is Iced Tea
“And unlike the rest of the world, about 80% of the tea consumed in the U.S. Is iced tea.”
Raz: US Tea Market Grew from Under $2B to Over $13B
“But even though coffee is king in the U.S., the domestic tea market has grown from under two billion dollars in 1990 to more than thirteen billion dollars today.”
Numi Tea launched at five to ten times conventional tea bag prices.
“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.”
Ahmed Rahim credits psychedelics with saving his life and expanding his worldview.
“Well, I always say that psychedelics saved my life, and definitely gave me an awareness of what the bigger world is like”
Rahim: Co-founded Eastern European Wholesale Business Selling 300 Loose Teas
“They asked me to be a partner, then we opened up some more tea houses, and then we ended up opening up a, Pretty big wholesale business of loose teas, about 300 loose teas that we sold to tea houses through a lot of Eastern Europe.”
Reem Hassani decided to import traditional Middle Eastern dried lime tea.
“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.”
Suppliers initially mistook Numi for automotive manufacturer NUMMI
“I used to call people for packaging and I'd say I'm from NuMe. And they would call me back. They would give me all the attention in the world. I'd be like, wow, they're really helping a tiny little startup. And then later on, I realized they thought we were ne…”
Numi will never discontinue its weak-selling namesake dried lime tea.
“Even though it still doesn't perform that well, 20 years later, we would never get rid of it.”
Reem Hassani predicted the artisanal coffee movement would also happen to 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.”
Numi Tea Financed Its Launch With a $250K Line of Credit on Dad's Home
“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…”
The co-founders' father bailed out Numi using his pension plan.
“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”
Numi generated over $100,000 in retail orders during its first year.
“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.”
Food service and luxury hotels drove Numi's revenue early on.
“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…”
Starbucks acquiring Tazo drove independent coffee roasters to buy Numi instead.
“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…”
Numi hit $4.5 million in revenue by year four on $2,000 salaries.
“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.”
Hain Celestial made a firm acquisition offer to purchase Numi Tea.
“Yeah, they did make a hard offer.”
Numi tapped a $1 million credit line on their father's house.
“We just had this working line capital from the bank on our dad's house, which by then increased to almost a million dollars.”
Numi's revenue flatlined during the Great Recession after hitting $20 million.
“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…”
Numi took about ten years to reach positive EBITDA profitability.
“About 10 years into the business, we were able to kind of get a lot more solid and create a profitable EBITDA.”
Numi raised $5 million, then $25 million to buy out early investors.
“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.”