A brand built around a story.

Tazo was started in Portland, Oregon, in January 1994 by Steven Smith, the tea blender who had co-founded Stash Tea in 1972, according to English Wikipedia and Smith’s obituary in The New York Times. The brand’s current website still names him as “our founder”: it says that on his travels he found “bolder, more unique blends to brew,” and that “in 1994, he created TAZO® Tea.” English Wikipedia says early investors included Stephen Lee, a fellow Stash founder, and Tom Mesher, and that Tal Johnson, formerly of the investment firm Endeavour Capital, became chief executive in 1995.

From the start Tazo was a brand built around a story. English Wikipedia says it was created with the Portland design firm Sandstrom Partners and the writer Steve Sandoz, and that it blended “the history and myth of tea cultures with a unique sense of humor.” Its tagline was “The Reincarnation of Tea,” and every box was once labelled as “blessed by a certified tea shaman” — a title English Wikipedia gives to Smith himself, who is credited with developing more than 60 blends.

Sandstrom Partners lists the project in its own portfolio as “Tazo Tea name logo, visual identity, brand story, packaging, retail displays and promotion design,” which credits the studio with the name as well as the look; we give that as the firm’s account. The same studio later designed the name, logo and packaging of Smith’s last company, Steven Smith Teamaker, by its own account.

Marketed with that “Reincarnation of Tea” line, the brand found distribution in grocery shops and food-service operations across North America, English Wikipedia says; it describes the marketing and labelling as “New Age”-style.

Starbucks, Unilever, CVC.

Starbucks bought Tazo in January 1999. English Wikipedia says Tazo had approached Starbucks’ then chief executive, Howard Schultz, in 1998 in search of investment partners, and that the coffee chain paid $8.1 million, citing the Puget Sound Business Journal. Smith and his team continued to lead the business until January 2006, when he retired from Tazo. In 2002 he set up the CHAI Project, a collaboration between Tazo, Starbucks, the aid agency Mercy Corps and Tazo’s supply-chain partners in the tea-growing regions of Darjeeling and Assam, English Wikipedia says.

In November 2012 the company opened its first Tazo-branded tea shop; it closed about a year later and became a Teavana store, according to English Wikipedia. Starbucks had bought Teavana in 2012, and in November 2017 it sold Tazo to Unilever for $384 million, USA Today reported, focusing on Teavana instead.

Tazo then moved with Unilever’s tea business. In November 2021 Unilever agreed to sell most of that business to the private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners for €4.5 billion, and the sale was completed in July 2022, according to The Grocer and the Australian trade title Food & Drink Business. Unilever kept its tea business in India, Nepal and Indonesia and its ready-to-drink Lipton joint venture with PepsiCo. The business it sold, first called ekaterra, was renamed Lipton Teas and Infusions; English Wikipedia gives its headquarters as Amsterdam and lists its brands as including Lipton, PG Tips, Pukka, T2, Red Rose and Salada as well as Tazo.

Smith co-founded Steven Smith Teamaker in Portland in 2009, English Wikipedia says, and died in March 2015, The New York Times reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell tea in North America: Bigelow, Celestial Seasonings, Stash, Tazo, Mighty Leaf and Numi are American, and Red Rose was founded in Canada before crossing the border. Between them they cover much of what a North American shopper finds on the tea shelf, from boxes of bagged black tea to herbal blends and caffeine-free infusions, sold through supermarkets as well as natural-foods stores.

A North American tea brand’s identity is usually carried by a box, a name and a blend rather than by a place, because the leaf inside may have been grown on another continent and blended somewhere else again. Names also travel between owners: a brand can be sold, licensed or split by country while the box on the shelf looks much the same, which makes the questions behind each one worth asking plainly — who started it, who owns it now, where its tea is bought and where it is actually blended and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its tea comes from and where it is packed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Exocet capitals, then a new mark.

Today’s Tazo is sold through a US website operated by Lipton Teas and Infusions United States, with separate pages for Canada. Its range spans tea bags — among them Passion, a blend the company describes as hibiscus flowers, orange peel, rose hips and passion fruit flavour with a hint of cinnamon, Zen, Awake English Breakfast and Refresh Mint — as well as chai latte concentrates, iced tea concentrates, matcha latte powders and K-Cup pods. We found no statement on the pages we read about where Tazo’s teas are blended or packed, so we make no claim about manufacturing.

The identity has been reworked over three decades. English Wikipedia says that until 2013 the logo used a slightly modified version of Exocet, and that in 2006 the T was altered for readability by sliding its crossbar towards the top of the letter; a different logo has been used since 2013. Exocet is a decorative, all-capital serif typeface designed by the British typographer Jonathan Barnbrook for the Emigre foundry in 1991; according to Barnbrook’s own description, as cited by English Wikipedia, it was inspired by ancient incised Greek and Roman letter carvings, and Wikipedia names Tazo as its best-known product use of the 1990s. We found no credit for the 2013 logo and no published brand guidelines. The current website sets the name in capitals as TAZO.

For a design guide, Tazo shows how far a written brand story can carry a product: an invented myth, a “certified tea shaman” and a display face cut from ancient inscriptions turned a Portland start-up into a brand that Starbucks and then Unilever paid to own. Compare Stash Tea, the company Steven Smith co-founded in 1972, and PG Tips, which sits in the same Lipton Teas and Infusions portfolio. For this guide we use a near-black, a hibiscus magenta and a chai gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tazo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.