#156 - David Segal Talks Building a 9-Figure Tea Business, Decommoditizing Boring Products & The Future of Retail

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
All right, so we got a special guest.
Got referred in through Harley from Shopify. David Segal. Segal or Seagull? How do you say it?

**David Segal** (0:30)
Seagull, but Seagull sounds a lot cooler, so.

**Sam Parr** (0:32)
Yeah, I was gonna say, related to one and only. Actually, the guy who started the company with you, is that a relative of yours? He also has the same last name.

**David Segal** (0:40)
Yeah, he's a distant cousin of mine. He's 50 years my senior.

**Sam Parr** (0:44)
That's the great starting pitch. It's like me and my 90-year-old cousin are gonna start a tea company.
So, give people like, I don't know, explain what is David's Teas for somebody who's never heard of it before, has never been inside one.

**David Segal** (0:58)
Sure, so when you think about tea, so we started it in 2007, and if you go back to that time, you either bought it in a grocery store where it was a commodity, right? You picked what you wanted based on the picture on the box and the price point, and you had the usual suspects, Earl Grey, Camomile, Mint, and then you had 10 brands of Earl Grey and 10 brands of Mint, et cetera.
Or you somehow found a tea shop that was either very Asian or very British and quiet, and you felt like you had to whisper. And even just to walk in the store, you felt like you had to know something about tea. We had the idea because nobody's really doing tea in a fun way on the main streets of the country. And tea had this stodgy vibe to it. And really there was an opportunity to make it a lot younger. And when you think about tea, it's actually a specific plant. It's the Camellia sinensis plant, but how you process it makes it different. But in North America, we call any herb, spice, fruit that you put in hot or cold water, that's not coffee, we call it tea.
Yeah, so I had the idea, I turned to my now 90 year old cousin and said, And why don't you-

**Shaan Puri** (1:59)
So you're not joking.

**David Segal** (2:01)
No.

**Shaan Puri** (2:02)
I thought the 90 year old thing was a-

**Sam Parr** (2:04)
Like hyperbole.

**David Segal** (2:06)
Yeah, no, I mean, he's 90 now. He wasn't 90 then, right? He was in his seventies then. I was a young entrepreneur. I had been a hustler most of my life.
I had different businesses that didn't work. Some that did to some degree, and then came across this idea. I was actually working for him at the time to help him make investments in small companies. Had this idea for T, turned to him. We looked at a few to invest in, realized the market was pretty wide open. He said, you do it and I'll back you. And I was like, great.
We got to work. We built a brand, grew it. And anyway, at its height, it was billion dollar market cap on the NASDAQ, 200 million sales. I sold my stake in 2016
I moved on and I've been doing other things. I started a restaurant brand and I've added two other restaurant brands and turned it into a virtual kitchen. And I'm looking to get back into tea, to be honest with you. I think there's still a huge opportunity in tea, but yeah.

**Sam Parr** (2:54)
So your cousin who you started with, he had done something cool before this, right? Like some hotel or something like that?

**David Segal** (2:59)
No, clothing business. So he had a company called Le Chateau, which was at one time very big in Canada and even had a go at the US market as well.
He started in 1959 He was selling in the sixties to like John Lennon and like there was some pretty interesting characters. And what he did was he brought the Carnaby Street look in the sixties to Montreal and it was really successful. And he stepped back from it in the mid-2000s and was looking to make these investments. And yeah, I mean, it was a great combination of, at the time I was 26 years old and full of piss and vinegar and I still am.

**Sam Parr** (3:32)
I've never heard that phrase. What does that phrase mean? Just like-

**David Segal** (3:34)
I guess piss and vinegar is like an explosive combination. I don't know. It's a good question. I never actually thought about what it meant. It's just one of these things you hear and you're like, all right.

**Shaan Puri** (3:42)
Did this make you incredibly wealthy?