Rishi Tea & Botanicals

Joshua Kaiser started Rishi Tea in 1997 at age 24, after years traveling through Southeast Asia and the Caribbean left him unable to find the handcrafted teas he'd grown fond of once he was back home in Milwaukee. He brought in Benjamin Harrison, a friend since their days as classmates at Rufus King High School, and the two launched the company on $45,000 and a line of credit in a 400-square-foot windowless space in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward, hand-blending botanicals and packaging tea themselves before outgrowing it and relocating to Bay View.

The founding bet was that North American drinkers would embrace artisan tea the way they'd already embraced single-origin coffee and varietal wine — a wager made at a moment when quality loose-leaf tea was genuinely hard to find in the US.

From a windowless 400-square-foot room funded by $45,000 and a favor from a relative, Rishi grew into one of the more established names to come out of the specialty tea movement Kaiser bet on at 24.