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The weight of trade policy uncertainty is hitting small businesses with 145% tariffs on goods from China and rising trade tensions. Businesses we know are looking to find their footing amid growing fears. For insights on the state of small business, we're speaking with husband and wife duo Ali and Jamila Wright, co-owners of Brooklyn Tea. Welcome both of you to the set. Appreciate it.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for having us.

I will ask you, maybe to start for the unfamiliar, for viewers. Tell us a little bit about Brooklyn Tea, how you all started, just the history of it.

Yes. So, again, I'm Jamila Wright.

I'm Ali Wright.

And we got started with Brooklyn Tea in our apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. So we set out to expose our community and hopefully the world to the health benefits of tea and also the magic of just communing with the person across the table, um, through tea, then tea being the conduit. So we started from our apartment and we asked our friends and family and dumped out our retirement savings and opened up a brick and mortar in 2018. Um, but the essence of the Y behind Brooklyn tea really is my husband's childhood experience with tea.

So my family is West Indian, we're Jamaican, and tea's a really big part of our culture. We drink tea in the morning, we drink tea at night, tea for a sprained ankle. Tea is always the answer. Um, and so in my house, I've been bringing my mom tea since I was three years old. Took it to college, and then a lot of our dating was around tea, so I'd take her tea hopping instead of bar hopping, make her pots of tea with cinnamon sticks in the bottom.

Super romantic, I have to tell you. It definitely worked.

We kind of opened the tea shop together and, yeah.

So let me ask you too, so you started in 2018.

Mhm.

Now it's been, it's seven years.

Yes.

Like a lot of small business owners, you're now dealing with this dynamic tariffs, right? Front and center, a new potential headwind. How are you all dealing with that dynamic? How are you navigating that challenge?

Okay. So there's a layer of anxiety there. I think you could probably understand. Um, tea is the core of our business. We're Brooklyn tea, and we are importers of tea. You know, that's how we, um, that is how we make our dollar. Uh, and so, as you know, tea is being, um, heavily taxed or the tariffs are extremely high for countries like China. And you can imagine China being the origin of tea, where we source a lot of our flavors from. Um, it's a bit of, um, a tricky situation.

Yeah. So for a real concrete example, I was ordering tea, um, it was actually from Thailand, and they told us to, don't buy it today, we think the terrain's going to be different tomorrow. So we're actually having phone calls instead of emails because it's so complicated and complex that no one on either side really knows what's going to happen next. So we're kind of like waiting and seeing what's going to happen next or it's just like, you know, just supply our shop.

Does it mean, Ali, as you try to navigate this though, and you're thinking of, okay, potential levers I might need to pull as a small business owner. Is it okay, we might have to eat some of that cost? Do you have the margin to eat that cost? Do you have to pass that along? Some combination of the two?

Yeah. So we are putting everything on the table as options, right? So, um, there is the possibility of teas and our more exclusive, um, high-quality teas being, um, priced up a little bit while keeping our, um, our more casual flavors like the mangoes and the raspberry, um, green teas, those can stay pretty normal. Um, so, and but the Zingaba Woolongs, right? Those more, um,

Exclusive.

Exclusive teas being increasing that customer base typically knows that that tea is something that they have to pay more for. So trying to cushion most of the neighborhood while adding a little bit other way other ways.

We're also thinking of because China is being tariffed so heavily of trying to get some of the similar teas from different places. Kenya is the third largest exporter of tea.

So how hard is it, Ali, to shift like that for you?

Oh, it's terrible. A lot of the, yeah. So the way small businesses can function against big businesses is building these relationships. So we have relationships with these small farmers in China right now, right? And so we have to now make new relationships and new places and abandon our current relationships. And, you know, they don't want to charge us more either because, you know, person to person, they don't want to charge us more, we don't want to pay more. So we're kind of stuck in this limbo of what do we do?

I can see.

Yep. And also we lose a little bit of the storytelling aspect. So when you want to have a Chinese green tea, the, the story, the beauty of saying, oh, we got this from a small farm that in China, right? We lose a little bit of what is, I mean, honestly, some of the branding and marketing behind our company.

Quickly, as a longtime coffee drinker, Ali, what is the bridge to tea world that I need to have on my radar?

Yeah. So you need to try the caramel puer. It's a black tea with caramel pieces and a little bit of almonds. So it tastes something like a flavored coffee, but it also has caffeine. So you're not going from high caffeine to zero, going for high caffeine to medium high caffeine. So it's a smooth bridge onto, you know, one day a nice oolong.

You sold me. It sounds delicious.

Jamila, Ali, thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it. Best of luck.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much.