My Journey Into Tea

How tea found me, changed me, and brought me back to myself.

How Tea First Found Me

Oddly enough, I found my passion for tea in a coffee shop when I was about 22 years old in 2012. Coming from a family of coffee drinkers, and being from the South in Savannah, Georgia, the only tea we ever drank was iced sweet tea. To pursue my dream of opening a café, I needed to learn the basics, so I went to work for a coffee shop.

During my orientation, they gave me a tour of all their products. I saw the huge amount of different coffees, and as they guided me around, we came to a small shelf with maybe five tea blends. One of the blends had a passionflower on the cover, and I had never seen a flower like that in my life. It was probably the coolest flower I had ever seen.

I asked them about it, and they told me the tea was made from that flower. My mind was blown. I could actually drink this awesome-looking flower. Suddenly I no longer cared about the coffee they kept telling me about. I was more concerned with learning more about this cool-looking flower.

My Journey Into the World of Tea

When I got home, I researched it, and not only was this flower amazing-looking, but it had health benefits. Then I found out there were teas made from more flowers and from roots. Then I read about the camellia sinensis plant, the tea plant, and I was completely pulled into all of it. That moment is what started me on my tea journey. A coffee shop.

As I kept working there, I noticed something else. The tea drinkers who came in, even though they were few, always seemed calmer than the coffee drinkers. More relaxed. Maybe even wiser. I could not explain it, but there was something serene about them. I had suffered from severe anxiety since childhood, and I wanted that calm. I wanted to be like them.

As I researched tea, I started reading about tea masters and how zen they were. Trust me, my research went very deep, but through it I developed a profound respect for tea and its culture. The words of those tea masters became words I clung to. Their teachings led me down so many different paths that I could honestly write a book about it all. I wanted to be like those zen tea masters, like those calm tea drinkers.

I started drinking tea and never looked back. I still enjoy coffee, but my passion lies in tea.

The Moment Tea Trail Was Born

So I decided I no longer wanted a coffee shop. I wanted a tea shop. I wanted a place filled with amazing, relaxed, friendly people like the tea drinkers I met at the coffee shop. I wanted to introduce people like me to tea, people who had never heard of it or never had it, and I wanted to provide current tea drinkers with my own teas.

Funny enough, the name Tea Trail did not even form out of the word tea, and I was not even thinking of a name for my tea company yet, the company I wanted to create someday. But around that same time I was thinking about starting one. I was at a place, a nature reserve, and they had a trail shaped like a T, I am guessing, and they called it the T Trail. The moment I heard the name of that trail, I knew my tea company would be called Tea Trail. I walked that trail and I thought about tea, and that was my first journey on the T Trail, and that is when it became the Tea Trail.

The Years I Lost Myself

Well, I did not know the first thing about business, and I definitely did not have any money to start one, but I decided to start with a logo. I knew how I wanted the logo to look, but I could not draw at all, so I went to my best friend Patrick, who could. I told him what I was thinking, and he just said stop. He told me he already knew what I wanted, and he drew the image as if he reached into my mind and pulled it out.

Times were different then. We did not have the resources we have now, or at least I did not. I got the drawing vectorized on Fiverr, I think. Then I ordered some tea tins from China and some label stickers from Zazzle, and suddenly I had tea tins with my logo on them. I even sold a few to coworkers and friends, but I did not know how to scale. With my minimum wage job I could not afford to buy many tins, and the stickers were expensive.

A few months later in that same year, 2014, my father passed away. Life was really hard for me then, and after I lost my father I fell into depression. I was also pretty much homeless. I was not quite on the streets, but I was close. I was sleeping on a bench at my job at night for a while. I stopped working on Tea Trail, and honestly I did not even drink tea for years.

The Return to Tea

In 2019 I met my wife. I found a decent-paying job. We eventually bought a house, and life got a little easier. Things slowed down. One day I was standing in my kitchen and glanced up at my teaware on top of the cabinets. I suddenly really wanted a cup of tea, specifically silver needle, but in that moment I was confused. I asked myself why I had stopped drinking tea, why I had neglected this passion for so long. I think a part of me did not want the tea until life finally slowed down and I could truly enjoy it again. I advocate turning to tea to slow down, but maybe I knew I could not slow down back then, so I put it off for so long, and when life finally did slow, tea was right there waiting for me.

I pulled my teaware down, placed an order for some silver needle, and when I took that first sip it all came back to me. The first sip reminded me how much I loved tea, and the second sip made me think of Tea Trail. And the cup, that cup reignited everything I wanted to do. It gave me my dream back and the determination to pursue it.

Building Tea Trail With What I Have

Trust me, I am still not rich. I still live paycheck to paycheck. But I wanted to continue my dream of bringing Tea Trail back to life, so I did. I redid my logo to represent how I see it now, and I think it changed with me. I have been putting in everything I have to make this dream of owning a real tea shop come true. Twenty dollars here when I have it, one hundred dollars there when I have it, and every sale goes right back into making Tea Trail better. My website is amazing, but my goal is to have a brick and mortar tea shop.

So I work my 9 to 5 job, and when I get home I work on Tea Trail. On weekends I run markets whenever I can. I do everything myself. I design the labels, print them, cut them, apply them, make blends, package the tea, design my website, update it. Everything is done by me.

Where This Trail Leads

Tea Trail is more than a business to me. It is a journey that saved me, slowed me down, grounded me, and gave me purpose again. It is the dream I refuse to let go of, the calm I try to share, and the path I walk every day.

Thank you for walking part of that path with me. - Jacob Frizzell