Verdant Tea exists to serve the farmers who put their trust in us to represent their teas.

That means that we begin every year reflecting on what we can do better. On a very fundamental level that means:

• •  Help our partners share exactly as much tea as they want to produce
• •  Make sure the teas they produce can be enjoyed thoroughly and deeply by a wide audience in a way that boosts international respect for each farmer’s work
• •  Do the above in a way that helps each farmer family thrive now and lay the groundwork for thriving in the next generation.

just some of the people behind Verdant Tea:
He Qingqing, Ren Weiwei, Wang Huimin, David and Lily Duckler with He Changke, Liu Jiaqi, and Li Xiangxi

Helping our partners share everything they want to share means building out collections of rare varietals, pre-buying ahead of harvests to keep production feasible when it is being done by a single family instead of a factory, and making a name for the teas our partners are most excited about.

Honoring the way the teas are enjoyed is about honoring you. Our partners like the He Family in Laoshan are driven by a passion to do their very best because it brings them joy to see their teas loved across the world. Making sure you can enjoy your teas to the fullest means keeping our prices as low as possibleso you can try even the rarest teas, and providing lots of background - video, tasting notes, articles etc - on each tea.

Doing this in a way that builds a robust and thriving community at its core is about giving instead of taking.

Giving the highest purchase price possible to our farmer-partners, and giving you the lowest prices and highest quality possible in return. Profit margin extracts wealth that could otherwise be building tea communities on both sides - both more secure farming communities and more accessible teas at the highest end to inspire the next generations of tea lovers.

This year, that means our 2026 resolutions are about trimming any overhead that doesn’t go to the farmers themselves or to lower prices for you.

We do this in a lot of ways:

First and foremost, we’ve stayed independently owned for over fifteen years in a world where almost everything you see online is venture-capital backed. Independent ownership means that we can set goals that don’t align with higher profit. This is the most basic tenet of a business that serves interests beyond its own.

We’ve certainly been approached over the years by investors, but we’ve turned down every investor in order to protect our ability to make decisions to benefit you and benefit our partners, even at the cost of profit.

Second, we don’t allocate money to marketing. No Google Ads, SEO spam, or any of the other annoying stuff that litters the internet these days.

"Experts" tell us that we should be spending 30% of our income on marketing, but that would mean raising prices by 30% or asking the people who actually grow and make these teas to take 30% less. We’ll do neither.

When you spend your money with Verdant, we want to honor that trust and expense. If we passed your money back to Google instead of to our partners - the people who actually do the critical work of growing and making these teas -  to us, that means we would not be running a business that serves your interests.

This also means we might not be growing as fast as the trend of the month, but over fifteen years, your word of mouth has allowed us to grow into a company that can truly support the growers behind it.

Third, our own operations overhead is low.

We don’t keep a San Francisco or New York tea house space that we have to paying high rent for. We have a modest warehouse in Saint Paul, MN and a small food safe licensed packing and logistics space in Laoshan. Lauren, Lily and David pack all our orders ourselves, and Weiwe and He Qingqing coordinate with all of our other partners to package everyones' teas.

We do not have some big anonymous crew to do the important work of getting you your tea while we go off and play influencers. It is important to us to personally pick out samples for you, to get to know your taste by shipping your orders out ourselves, and to write you a note with our thanks in every box.

Our way of doing things keeps costs low while working to honor your trust with truly personal care. In turn, low overhead means that we can keep our prices as low without underpaying our partners across China. If we marked up by the same percentages that are common in our industry, our tea would be at least 3x what it costs now. Instead, even though we are buying the best tea in the world from the most talented tea farmers and letting them set their prices, we cut the middle costs (ourselves!) to keep you all connected and keep prices as low as we can.

In 2026, we plan to keep tackling rising shipping costs, high tariffs, inflation on everything we buy (from cardboard boxes to web hosting) and make sure we find creative solutions to keep our prices stable.

On top of this, we plan to keep expanding the teas and teawares we offer so that you have access to the very rarest and most experimental, most award-winning teas our partners are making, along with more hand-made teawares. A bigger selection helps tell a more complete story to honor each farmer while giving you new and interesting teas to discover. In turn, the more we bring in, the better the shipping rates we can get to counterbalance higher costs.

Our model is a weird one. To us, it feels like the obvious way to run a business, but perhaps it’s a perspective that grew out of the way we started: first as a research project, then as cultural exchange and friendship with individual growers.

Sharing our friends' work has always come before profit, and it always will, in 2026 and for years to come. 

Thank you for making this possible!