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We are British, Japanese and Chinese and for over 30 years we have been traveling to tea growing regions. These travels gave us our name Postcard Teas and were part of a new wave of tea in the 1990s that saw tea merchants in the West starting to go directly to producers to source their teas. Since then, we have have tried to change tea for the better by offering radically different ways to buy and brew tea. 

Our extensive travels made it possible for us in 2008 to became the first tea company in the world to put the maker’s name and location on our 70+ teas including all our blends. We believed this was important for transparence and connoisseurship because you need proper provenance to understand more about a tea by learning about the people, place, process, period of time and plant that make it.

In 2012 we stopped retailing any tea grown on plantations and switched to only working with micro farms who farmed less than 15 acres – today the average size of our farms is just 5 acres which is about the size of two football fields. While we had previously predominantly worked with small farms and a few well-run plantations, we felt that the colonial plantation style of production was no longer for us because we believe small producers of less than 15 acres are demonstratively better for the people, the local economy, and the planet. Today over a decade after we introduced this new idea of “small tea” there are a few more teas available from small farms but plantation production still supplies most of the speciality and ethical teas in the West and we are amused that many of these teas have been rebranded as coming from “small” family farms though the farms are often a hundred times the size of our small family farms. 

Postcard Teas started out as a retail business but over the years we have supplied tea to iconic UK stores, chefs, restauranteurs, bakeries and coffee shops such as Selfridges, Liberty, Fenwicks, Harrods, Perfumer H, Margaret Howell, Wedgwood, Asprey, Claridges, The Peninsula London, The Fat Duck, L’Enclume, The Clove Club, Lyles, The River Cafe, Koya, Endo at The Rotunda, Stevie Parle, Corbin & King, Keith McNally, Alan Yau, Robin Birley, Poilane, Violet Bakery, Prufrock Coffee, Esters, and many other special businesses including great businesses abroad like the Roellingers in France and the Noma group in Denmark. We have also worked with some of the above to introduce our unique tea brewing methods like sparkling cold brew (1999) and ambient tea (2016) which has been widely adopted by Michelin starred restaurants for their soft pairings. Postcard Teas has also worked with the BBC, NHK, and CCTV Chinese State television on documentaries and films about tea. 

TIMOTHY D’OFFAY

Over 30 years ago while living in Japan’s ancient capital Kyoto, Tim became fascinated by tea culture and the tea growing areas around the city. Using Japan as a base, he soon started to explore the tea traditions of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong as well. These experiences led him to start importing tea in the late 1990s from the people and places he had visited and in 2000 he co-founded East Teas at Borough Market with the tea expert Alex Fraser. Since then he has travelled extensively across Asia to many of the famous tea producing areas in India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and China. Tim has written three books on tea including The Life of Tea with Michael Freeman which won Best Drink Book at the 2019 Fortnum & Mason Book Awards. He has also helped companies like Wedgwood, Hennessy and Absolut better understand tea or develop new products.

ASAKO D’OFFAY

Asako comes from a Shizuoka family with a long tea tradition. Her great-grandfather was a pioneering tea farmer who established tea fields in the Mount Fuji area. He was succeeded by his son who produced teas for the Emperor of Japan and who made one of the country’s first black teas. Asako continues the tea tradition by working with farms across Japan and also by studying tea ceremony with her aunt, an Omote Senke Tea School instructor.

ZHOU LU

Zhou Lu is the Creative Director of Postcard Teas. She was born and raised in Beijing where she studied at the famous Central Academy of Fine Arts. Lu later won a scholarship to the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm before again being chosen to receive a special post graduate scholarship program in Ceramics at the Royal College of Art. Through her love of ceramics, she came to be interested in the special relationship between tea and ceramics. For the past ten years, Lu has sourced some of our most prestigious Chinese teas and has been working with some of China’s finest tea makers and ceramicists to bring tea and teaware of a quality rarely seen in the West since the 18th century.

ALEX SIMPSON

Alex came to Postcard Teas after working in speciality coffee and has been working closely with Tim since 2012. Amazed by the huge variety of flavour, style and culture that tea has to offer, he has developed a deep understanding of the teas we import and now manages our Camden warehouse, oversees all of the tea blending, grinding, roasting and product development. In 2017 he made his first visit to Daintree Estate in Australia to learn more about tea processing. A keen beer brewer and distiller, Alex has also been experimenting with using tea during the process of making alcoholic drinks.

JONATHAN NUNN

Jonathan has been working closely with Tim since 2012 although his connection with Postcard Teas started even earlier. Originally he was a customer of Postcard Teas and it was a cup of a single tree dancong tasted at the shop that convinced him that he wanted to work professionally in tea. Of mixed British and Indian heritage, made his first visit to Asia in 2013 when he went to see the small farms of Sahyadri co-operative in Kerala and has since met tea farmers in Japan and Taiwan. Jonathan is currently working on our retail and wholesale operations, and when not drinking Puerh, he writes about food and edits Vittles.

MARIE BERNE

Marie is the French element to Postcard Teas. She holds a Ph.D in Comparative Literature, writes, lived in Hong Hong for five years and worked in the wine industry for a little while. Her journey with Postcard Teas started when she discovered that a tea could last for hours in her palate after having had a cup and when she realized that tea was also made by a real person taking care of his trees, just like good wine. Marie is now responsible for the sourcing of all of our tisanes and has been working with small farms in France and Morocco since 2016.

HAYDN WEST

Haydn arrived at Postcard Teas in 2017, with a huge amount of tea experience behind him. Having been involved in speciality tea since 2012, Haydn became fascinated by tea culture and in 2016 traveled across China in search of knowledge and teas. He spent time in Yunnan, Fujian and Zhejiang. He has gone on to become heavily interested in tea related craft and combines this passion with his love for fine art photography. Haydn currently manages the shop and in-store events.

JOSHUA LANE YANA

Joshua has been working with Postcard Teas since 2017 and is particularly interested in Japanese tea culture which stemmed from his early interest in Japan and its culture, especially literature which has frequently alluded to and led him to tea and crafts. His interest and passion in green tea is closely connected to his love of music for which both, together are great inspirations and catalysts in his art and writings. After many years, Joshua returned to Japan this autumn visiting the small farms of Ureshino and Kumamoto on the southern Island of Kyushu that we work with to gain a more personal understanding and relationship with the farmer’s and the land in which they have worked, live, cultivate and produce the tea – tea that Joshua loves so much.

YUMA CROSS

Born in Tokyo, Yuma originally comes from a design background. Having started off in specialty coffee after living in Melbourne, she came to be interested in Japanese tea upon a visit to Uji tea farm in Kyoto. Seeing the mountains awash with abandoned tea gardens, an effect brought on by the bottled green tea market, she developed a connection with tea and those involved. Her journey truly began upon arrival in London where she joined Postcard Teas in 2022. Aside from enjoying a floral High Mountain Oolong Tea, Yuma loves to make stuff – from pottery and natural dyes to baking things to enrich her tea drinking experience.

ELSIE GOLDEN

The newest member of the Postcard Teas family, Elsie, studied food product development and sensory science in the hub of food technology in California, while concurrently working as a chef at a Michelin level both in the states and in London.  Despite studying beer, wine and coffee at Uni, it was the first time she tried gyokuro in Japan that her heart was instantly won over by the amazing potential of tea. Her infatuation with the implementation of tea in patisserie and unusual flavour combinations has her constantly experimenting, and she is helping to develop tea accoutrements for Postcard Teas in addition to packing and blending tea in the warehouse during the week.