Numi Organic Tea: Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.7 • 31.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2021

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When they were in their 20s, Reem Hassani and her brother Ahmed Rahim were not the kind of people you'd expect to launch a multi-million dollar business. Reem was a California artist moonlighting as a substitute teacher, and Ahmed had been living the bohemian life of a photojournalist in Europe. But these two children of immigrants from Iraq had an idea: to introduce the dried lime tea they remembered from their childhood to the U.S. Working out of Reem's 600-square-foot apartment in Oakland, the siblings learned all about the challenges of lining up importers, packagers, and retailers to launch a premium loose-leaf tea brand—meant to be slowly steeped and savored. More than twenty years after it's launch in 1999, Numi Organic Tea is a privately held B Corporation that sells tens of millions of dollars of Fair Trade, organic tea every year. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:30.0	We brought on some investors that put a lot of pressure on us
0:37.0	and when you're under pressure from the top down from investors
0:41.0	and we're not performing from the bottom's up, then you're in the hot seat
0:45.0	of 20% growth wasn't enough.
0:48.0	They wanted 30, 40, 50 and if we have 30 that wasn't enough.
0:52.0	So it was just a pressure of more performance and some of them
0:56.0	are used to getting 10 times their money.
1:03.0	From MPR, it's how I built this.
1:05.0	Show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,
1:08.0	and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:17.0	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today,
1:19.0	brother sister team took a childhood memory from Iraq
1:23.0	and turned it into a flourishing beverage business,
	...

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