#52 The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders

**David Senra** (0:03)
And so a business is born. Like all birth, it began with a gathering of the energies of conception, then a fusion and growth. As a gestation, it was exactly as long as it needed to be. Recognizing that true creation takes place outside time, the Republic of Tea came to life when it was ready to be born. It was, to be sure, Bill, who carried it in him for the 20 up and down, all around months documented in these pages. And it was Bill, who in accepting his first dollar for a tin of tea in May 1992, delivered the baby to the world.
As for my role, I got him pregnant. In compiling these letters for publication, a keystone of ancient Hindu philosophy comes to mind.
Everything happens as it does because the universe is as it is. There is no formula for starting a business. It is an exercise as unique as the individuals who undertake it.
Starting the Republic of Tea was an exercise in allowing things to happen.
So starting a business is no different from starting anything else. A marriage, a painting, a new life. The opportunity it presents as a path to self-realization is the one most often overlooked, and yet I feel this is ultimately its greatest benefit. A business that is conceived in practicality will be congenitally dry. Bill and Patricia and I may have been a little wacky in some of our early ideas, but this is because we knew the day of practicality would come. Because we dared to be impractical at the outset, however, the Republic of Tea will likely carry with it a legacy of free, unmoored thinking, which is really the only true insurance policy a business can have.
So now we have the Republic of Tea. How long it will live, whether or not it will realize its limitless potential, the destiny it will shape for itself, these are the things that cannot be foretold.
The Republic of Tea is no longer a dialogue among us anymore. It is a dialogue between itself and customers. And if we correctly heard the winds whispering to us all those months that the Republic of Tea lived inside our heads, it will soon have people everywhere, pausing for a sip and a little piece of tea.
Okay, so that is from the epilogue of one of the strangest books I've ever read in my life, the book that I want to talk to you about today. That book is called The Republic of Tea. The subtitle is The Story of the Creation of a Business as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders. And it's written by Mel Ziegler, Patricia Ziegler and Bill Rosenweg, which are all the co-founders of Republic of Tea. Okay, so if you listened last week, we were introduced to the crazy characters that are Mel and Patricia Ziegler, probably best known for being the founders of Banana Republic.
And after they sold Banana Republic, they kind of went back to what they were doing in the sense that they only wanted to start a business so they could make enough money so they could live life on their own terms. They weren't really starting businesses for businesses' sake. And a few years later, they became obsessed with tea, which we'll get into today. And through a chance meeting, which I'll tell you about in a little bit, they decide to start another company. And the reason this book is so bizarre is because most of the books we cover, their biographies, autobiographies, basically they're telling us something that happened in history, something that's already done. In this book, the genesis of the ideas took place in writing because it was a series of faxes that were happening in, I think, the early 1990s, from 1990 to 1992, I think.
And somebody came along, saw all these faxes, and compiled it into a book. And so the book ends, with the epilogue where I just got to, the book ends at the founding of the business, which is very different from what we're used to discussing on this podcast. Well, actually, let me stop there. My name is David. If this is the first time you've listened to Founders, the premise of this podcast is really simple. Every week, I read a biography of an entrepreneur or a company builder, and I share ideas that I think were useful. Highlights, notes I left myself, not meant to be a summary, not meant to be a review, just ideas that I want to remember. And so instead of them just living in my notebook and in my highlights, I record a podcast. So hopefully you can learn from them as well. So the reason, going back to what I was saying about this being different is what we're going to see here and what unfolds over 250 pages is the genesis of an idea. And so let me read some of, what are they called? When people were like the blurbs.