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206 | Had No Business Starting a Business But Still Succeeded | with Sheena Brady

Honest Ecommerce
Honest Ecommerce
Episode • Jan 2, 2023 • 27m

Seeking an alternative from her previous adoption to coffee culture as a means to get through ambitious goals and to-do lists, over consumption and lack of focus on general wellbeing left Sheena Brady with various challenges including anxiety, digestion troubles, and insomnia. 

Along her ambitious career journey in hospitality, Sheena was tasked with building Toronto’s largest tea program at the renowned Shangri-La hotel. 

Plot twist: She didn’t even drink tea at the time. It was then she decided to become a certified Tea Sommelier, to better understand the world of tea and botanical ingredients. 

What she did not expect was to fall completely in love with this world, and learn how each botanical ingredient could actually be a puzzle piece into leading and living a more balanced life holistically. 

It wasn’t long before most of Sheena’s challenges were supported through tea, which became the catalyst behind launching Tease. 

Tease believes wellness rituals shouldn’t be complicated. Formulated by a Tea Sommelier & Herbalist, Tease creates all-natural, tea and botanical based tea blends and beauty staples to support your everyday rituals without compromising convenience, sustainability & impact. 

This includes having recently launched the world's first fully biodegradable and refillable wellness tea collection. 

Since the launch of this collection along with its diversification of tea infused beauty products, Tease has partnered with over 200 new retailers in the past year. 

In 2019, Tease amplified its social impact mission of investing in women, to create more equity amongst diverse women founders. 

Through their Founders Fund program, Tease has contributed & raised over $200,000 in small business micro-grants and mentorship programming to over 500 women and non-binary entrepreneurs, largely throughout the pandemic. 

Tease is proud to be a certified benefit corporation, meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental impact. Tease is proud to be a certified benefit corporation, meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental impact.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

  • [00:00] Intro
  • [01:23] What are Tease’s products?
  • [02:15] Where the tea love came from
  • [06:10] Sheena wasn’t fit to start a business before
  • [07:15] Tease’s most cringy influencer moment
  • [07:47] Being a social enterprise from the get-go
  • [08:31] Getting the first round of customers
  • [09:11] Investing really early in PR
  • [10:37] When Sheena went all-in on Tease
  • [12:37] Learning through the service side of business
  • [12:57] Going full-time needs sacrifice
  • [13:21] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io
  • [14:29] Sponsor: JSON-LD for SEO jsonld.app
  • [14:29] Sponsor: Wayflyer wayflyer.com/ecomm/honest
  • [17:33] The reason that made Sheena go full-time
  • [19:19] The tools that help Tease to scale aside from PR
  • [21:09] Customer feedback will help you fix things
  • [22:00] Done is better than perfect
  • [24:29] The importance of omnichannel strategy
  • [25:36] Where to find Tease products

Resources:

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