TeeGschwendner

TeeGschwendner started in 1976, when 22-year-old Albert Gschwendner, his wife Gwendalina and his brother Karl opened a tea shop in response to what they saw as a lack of good tea retail in Germany. A year later they expanded to Bonn under the idea of treating tea as an experience rather than a commodity purchase, and in 1982 the brothers began franchising the concept — an early move for the format in Germany at the time, which let the business expand nationally without the family funding every new shop itself.

The company took its current name in 1999, the same year it launched an online shop. Albert Gschwendner ran the business until his death in 2010; his son Jonathan became general manager in 2019, continuing family involvement into a third generation of leadership. TeeGschwendner describes its buying standard as selecting from a mere 0.5 percent of the world's annual tea harvest.

Now headquartered in Meckenheim with shops across Germany and beyond, TeeGschwendner's franchise model is the part of its history that let a single 1976 shop become a genuinely national tea retailer rather than staying a single Trier storefront.