On the road

10 days, 30 stores, and a beat-up Nissan Versa.

I launched my tea business at the beginning of last year and like most businesses, things started pretty slow. Labeling boxes one by one, obsessing over small details, the works. But somewhere around Labor Day, things started to really pick up—we went from 20 or 30 stores to over 100 in just a few months. Some weeks I’d even add a couple of new shops a day—it was incredibly exciting, but something I started to mistake for a new normal.

And then things slowed down.

When they did, I tried everything—cold emails, Instagram DMs, calling shops, hunting for mutual friends with the owners. Some of it worked but mostly I was sitting at my desk sending messages into the void. So I decided to look back at how I got those original 10 or 20 stores to see how my approach had changed and why things weren’t working. What I realized was that what I now call “sales” really just started out as conversation—talking to store owners about why I started the business.

It took me a minute to even realize that I had stopped doing it. I started trying to scale the business instead of thinking about what it was about human connection that allowed me to grow in the first place.

So I booked a flight to LA and rented a car for 10 days.

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I shipped a few cases of tea to my friend from high school (shoutout Ellen) and mapped out the shops that I wanted to visit, along with a number of stores that a friend in sales (shoutout Chris) recommended visiting too. I ended up racking up hundreds of miles driving to 30 or 40 shops in every corner of Southern California over those 10 days.

Every day my route was different. Driving from Glendale to Pasadena, from the West Side to the East Side, through neighborhoods like Little Armenia and Koreatown — where the food changed and the languages on the signs changed with it. Growing up in the Bay, I thought I understood California’s scale and grandeur, but driving around Los Angeles is a whole ‘nother thing. In the driver’s seat of the gray, slightly beaten up 2018 Nissan Versa I had rented, I’d be dodging Ferraris and Maseratis in Beverly Hills one minute and the next I’d be pulling over to a farmstand to enjoy strawberries that were plucked just yards away.

Meeting shop owners along the way gave me a new appreciation not just for the fabric of these cities, but for the individuals who hold them together. One conversation that sticks out to me was with Theresa Ruzumna, co-founder of LA Grocery and Cafe. Theresa’s background is in fine dining and she opened this store with her business partner—fellow restaurateur Caitlin Sullivan—back in 2024. When I got there, Theresa was walking around the store, taking a moment to speak to someone at every single table, it seemed like she knew everyone in there personally. But she welcomed me and took no less than 20 minutes out of her busy day to tell me about their cafe program and thoughtful approach to sourcing ingredients. Theresa had an uncompromising dedication to sourcing quality ingredients and a deep desire to understand where food comes from—something I saw often in LA, and that I’m trying to take with me back to New York.

So much came out of my trip to L.A. Most embarrassingly…the trip worked. I got into more of the stores in LA from walking in than I had from dozens of hours spent emailing and DMing from my apartment. Flying across the country and renting a car sounds like it would be the inefficient option, but in reality it wasn’t. So when I got back, I borrowed my friend’s car and did the same thing in my own city, and quickly realized that doing the “right things” to scale my business were the very things that got in the way of it actually growing.

It feels obvious now, but I think for a while I had lost sight of why connection still matters. There are times when this industry can feel like a race, but meeting people who spend their days thinking about one store, one drink, or one dish, helped remind me that there’s nothing wrong with taking your time and going a little slower.