The Tea Centre

The Tea Centre opened on Glenmore Road in Paddington, Sydney, on September 1, 1993, founded by Kim, a Swedish entrepreneur who had settled in Australia in the late 1980s and identified a gap in the market: a country with a strong coffee culture but almost no dedicated specialty tea retail. The original Paddington shop was built as a concept store specifically to shift how Australians thought about tea, treating loose leaf as a category worth the same attention as specialty coffee.

The idea found an audience — by 2014 the company had grown to twelve stores along Australia's east coast, and it now runs both physical shops with in-store tasting bars and an online store carrying more than 150 varieties across black, green, white, oolong, herbal, chai, matcha, and rooibos tea, alongside teaware and wholesale and corporate gifting lines.

More than three decades after one founder's bet that Sydney had room for a tea specialist alongside its espresso bars, The Tea Centre is still built on the same premise: quality loose leaf, tasted before it's bought, sold by people who treat tea as a category of its own rather than coffee's quieter sibling.