Bird & Blend Tea Co.

Bird & Blend started in 2013, when founders Krisi and Mike — who met studying Politics at university — sketched a business plan in a pub in the Canadian mountains, where they were working as ski instructors between studies. Back in England, they began packing tea from a bedroom and selling it at markets before opening physical shops; the company traded first as Bluebird Tea Co., rebranding to Bird & Blend in May 2018 as it grew into multiple UK stores and an international online shop.

The business is B Corp certified, re-certified as recently as 2024, meeting the third-party standard for balancing profit against social and environmental performance. Its ChariTEA program has given more than £425,000 to charities since 2014, and a partnership with the World Preservation Fund has funded the planting of close to 448,000 trees.

For a company that began as two people packing loose leaf in a bedroom after a ski-season pub conversation, the scale of both the retail footprint and the giving program built on top of it marks a specific, traceable growth arc rather than an inherited or franchised one.