It’s Teatime At Ulta Beauty: Teami Blends Generates Buzz At The Retailer With Matcha Skincare

Teami Blends gives tea the beauty treatment – and Ulta Beauty is drinking it up.

Last year, the brand stretched from detox beverages to face products to make it relevant to beauty stores, spas and salons, and expand the repertoire of merchandise customers could buy from it. The skincare step paid off early this year when Ulta Beauty brought its Green Tea Blend Detox Mask and Green Tea Facial Scrub online before rolling the products out to more than 660 locations last month.

“The skincare has opened doors for us that our wellness products may not have worked in,” says Adi Arezzini, co-founder and CEO of Teami Blends. “My customers are very loyal to our products because they’re so high quality. They want to be Teami customers forever. If I only gave them the tea, I wouldn’t be part of their entire lifestyle. I want to be a part of their skincare routines as well.”

Currently, skincare accounts for 35% of Teami Blends’ sales, and Arezzini expects that percentage to climb. A new release, chamomile flower facial oil Teami Repair, which is headed to Ulta Beauty later in the summer, has been snapped up quickly by customers on Teami Blends’ website and is out of stock. In total, the multimillion-dollar company anticipates sales will jump 26% this year after soaring 700% during its first two years of business in 2014 and 2015. In 2017, Arezzini reports over 100,000 customers purchased its products.

Social media has been a big business driver for Teami Blends, and Arezzini says it was crucial in convincing Ulta Beauty to take a chance on the brand. She shares Teami Blends collaborates with 2,000-plus influencers endorsing it on a monthly basis. Its teas have been featured in Instagram posts in the hands of everyone from Heidi Pratt to Sarah Palin. The brand’s Instagram following is currently at 595,000, and Arezzini’s objective is for it to hit 750,000 at the end of the year.

“The skincare has opened doors for us that our wellness products may not have worked in. My customers are very loyal to our products because they’re so high quality. They want to be Teami customers forever. If I only gave them the tea, I wouldn’t be part of their entire lifestyle. I want to be a part of their skincare routines as well.”

“We always make sure they use our products, and we identify people with the right type of audience for our brand,” she says of Teami Blends’ endorsers. “For example, if you go to bloggers with pages that are really pretty and they travel the world, those aren’t influencers that do well for us. We work with people that are in the health industry – they may be personal trainers – or went through weight-loss journeys themselves or, for the skincare products, makeup artists might resonate.”

Arezzini’s health journey led her to launching Teami Blends with co-founders Yair Piso and Yogev Malul. A former fitness instructor in the Israeli Defense Forces, Arezzini suffered from severe digestive problems and bloating while she was serving her native country. (Prior to her military stint, she emigrated to the U.S. from Israel at 6-years-old.) “I was only going to the bathroom once a week. That’s not comfortable and not healthy. I was active, but I looked like I was five months pregnant,” she recalls. “Nothing I did fixed it.”

Nothing was effective, that is, until Arezzini ran across ingredients, including oolong, yerba mate, lotus leaf, hawthorn berry and lime leaf extracts, senna, ginger, valerian and rhubarb roots, and psyllium husk and phaseolus calcaratus seeds, that would go on to constitute Teami Blends’ Colon Cleanse and Skinny Teas. Arezzini soon discovered she wasn’t alone in suffering from digestive problems that the ingredients could help. She says two out of three Americans don’t move their bowels regularly, a significant potential customer pool for Teami Blends’ offerings.

The brand’s natural, cruelty-free skincare products build upon the tea theme, but incorporate other ingredients for skin benefits. Case in point: Green Tea Facial Scrub pairs matcha with sugar and lemongrass. Lemongrass, an ingredient Arezzini emphasizes boosts moisture, is also in the Green Tea Blend Detox Mask in combination with bentonite clay and matcha. She says, “Most masks usually leave your skin red and dry, but, with this mask, you don’t feel like you took off a layer of your skin.”

“If you go into Ulta, you’re going to be looking at the coolest products around like makeup brushes that look like mermaids. That’s what people are interested in. That’s why I make my prodcuts super easy to understand. They’re good for all customers even if they are not interested in tea.”

Arezzini, 27, tries to keep the skincare reasonable for customers without tons of disposable income. The products are priced from $24.99 to $39.99. “The woman shopping at Target is my woman. She’s looking for trendy products she can afford, and something that works,” she says, noting Teami Blends’ core customers are between the ages of 25 and 34. Those customers might shop at Target, but Arezzini’s goal distribution partners are higher end. She’s aiming for retailers the likes of Nordstrom and Anthropologie, where Teami Blends’ teas are already sold and she hopes to break in with skincare.

Teami Blends plans to introduce two to three additional beauty items this year to complement its existing skincare portfolio containing the mask, scrub and three tea-powered three facial oils. “Skincare has become so complicated. People have 50 different skincare products in their bathrooms, and they have so many chemicals in them. Even though they’re supposed to be anti-aging, people are actually doing the opposite by continuously putting chemicals on their skin,” says Arezzini. “My purpose is to simplify skincare. You don’t have to have 50 products. You can have two or three products to have smooth, glowing skin.”

Although detox teas are ubiquitous on digital channels, Arezzini suggests tea isn’t a well-known factor in beauty. Teami Blends is out to change that with its straightforward approach. “I don’t think that tea-based natural skincare has really been understood by a lot of people. It’s only the people interested in homeopathic products that have become aware of it,” says Arezzini. “If you go into Ulta, you’re going to be looking at the coolest products around like makeup brushes that look like mermaids. That’s what people are interested in. That’s why I make my prodcuts super easy to understand. They’re good for all customers even if they are not interested in tea.”