David Segal loves tea too much to stay away from the industry.
Best known as the co-founder of Canadian loose leaf tea brand DAVIDsTEA, Segal announced today the launch of his latest project, Firebelly Tea, an ecommerce premium tea and accessories brand. Co-founded with Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, Firebelly specializes in high quality teas in sustainable packaging, made without artificial ingredients or flavors.
Sold exclusively through the company’s website, Firebelly offers 20 different loose leaf teas in a range of flavors and use occasions, including caffeinated green and black teas, herbal infusions, oolong, matcha and mate. Each 100 gram box makes 25-30 cups and ranges from $14.95 to $34.95 depending on the variety, with the bulk of the line priced around $18.95-$19.95.
Firebelly also offers a line of premium accessories, designed in partnership with creative agency Joe Doucet, including a stop-infusion travel mug, teapots, teacups, matcha bowls, tea strainers and whisks. Most of the items (save for the whisk) are available in a variety of colors and are intended to be “one cohesive collection,” Segal said.
“Firebelly is about bringing tea into the 21st century,” Segal told BevNET. “Whereas larger companies are trying to take a bigger chunk of the pie, we’re really just trying to grow the pie itself.”
Segal began DAVIDsTEA in 2008 with his cousin Herschel Segal as a boutique loose-leaf tea brand, eventually growing the company into a retail chain with over 200 stores across North America. Like Firebelly, the Montreal-based company emphasized premium products with strong visual aesthetics. But in 2016, one year after taking the company public, Segal left after “creative differences” with leadership.
In the years since his departure, DAVIDsTEA has faced declining sales and last year filed for bankruptcy, closing over 100 stores in the process. In June, the company made moves towards exiting insolvency with a plan to pay creditors CDN $18 million.
Segal is also the founder of Mad Radish, a healthy fast food restaurant chain launched in 2017 that has locations in Canada. However, he began making his way back to the tea business after learning that Finkelstein, a longtime friend, would never drink tea because he didn’t like the flavor. After converting him with his favorite quality teas, the two decided to create Firebelly as a side project while maintaining their current positions.
Firebelly, which uses a compostable zip-lock bag for its teas, is aiming to stand out within the tea space through a strong emphasis on quality, design, simplicity and sustainability, Segal said. He noted that most specialty tea brands use some form of artificial flavoring, which can also degrade recyclable packaging and lead companies towards using single-use plastics and other unsustainable packaging.
Firebelly also hopes to make the tea experience simpler for consumers and the website includes an interactive suggestion section where consumers can find teas based around their function and flavor preferences. The site also features short guides for brewing tea that avoid overly technical jargon which can be intimidating for inexperienced consumers.
“Often with tea, people pitch it like you need a PhD to make stuff,” Segal said. “It’s like use 76.252 Celsius degree water with 1.05 tablespoons per 327 milliliters of water for 2.5 to the pi… It’s like, really? Are you kidding me? So we devised a series of pro tips you can see on our website for making tea that are super easy.”
The new company is financially bootstrapped and has a small team. While Shopify is not officially involved with Firebelly, Segal credited Finkelstein’s experience in ecommerce as pivotal to crafting the company’s online-first strategy. Though Firebelly may look to launch in retail in the future, Segal said there’s no immediate plans to roll out into brick and mortar stores.
“We may look at select wholesale accounts and we may look at a retail experience down the road, but right now we’re really just focused on a great online experience and spreading the word,” he said. “I think the design of the product, and the quality of the tea and the quality of accessories, is going to speak for itself.”