Tease Tea Turns Ottawa Wellness Into Corporate Gifts

Sheena Brady left a full-time role on Shopify’s Merchant Success Team in 2015, two years after she started blending loose-leaf tea as a side project. The company she built from that side project, Tease, became the first tea company in Canada to earn Certified B Corporation status, and it recertified in 2024 with a score of 108.4. Corporate buyers building a verified sustainability story into their gifting programs keep coming back to her.

Meet Sheena Brady, the maker behind Tease

Sheena Brady built her early career in Ottawa’s hospitality industry, working her way from the Shangri-La group into a service leadership role. The hours were long, and she was running on five or six cups of coffee a day, which did nothing for the anxiety, insomnia, and digestion trouble that came with the pace. She started experimenting with tea and botanicals instead: rooibos before bed, maté for energy, moringa to calm down. She trained as a certified tea sommelier and kept refining her own blends until they became a business.

She launched Tease in late 2013 out of Ottawa, Ontario, while still working at Shopify as a Merchant Success Team lead. She ran both for two years, then left Shopify in 2015 to run Tease full time. The company has since grown into a name found in 600 or more retail doors across Canada and the United States as of mid-2026, and it holds a distinction no other Canadian tea company has: it was the first in the country to become a Certified B Corporation.

What Tease makes

Tease’s core lineup is loose-leaf and pyramid-bag tea blends organized by function rather than flavour alone: Golden Slumbers for sleep, Better Than Coffee as a caffeine swap, Glow & Grow for hair and nails, Blissfully Blue for a butterfly-pea pour that changes colour with citrus. The line also includes matcha and a small beauty set built around the same botanical ingredients: bath soak, body scrub, face mask.

Every tea bag is a plant-based pyramid, plastic-free and fully biodegradable, and the outer tube packaging is 100 percent biodegradable and refillable. The canister, the blend name, and the ingredient list are all visible the moment a box is opened, which matters for a gift that is meant to be unwrapped in front of someone.

The values built into every blend

Tease’s B Corp certification is not a marketing label. The company earned an initial certification score of 99.3 in 2021, then recertified in 2024 with a score of 108.4, well above the 80-point minimum required to pass and well ahead of the average business score of 50.9. On the environmental side, the pyramid tea bags are plant-based and plastic-free, and the outer packaging is 100 percent biodegradable and refillable, cutting down what a gift box leaves behind once the tea is gone.

Tease also runs its own Founders Fund, a four-month program funded in part by every purchase. Since 2019 it has put more than $200,000 into small-business grants and mentorship for early-stage founders. The federal government has featured Tease as a Women Entrepreneurship Strategy success story, citing funding that helped the company expand its retail collection into more than 350 stores across Canada and the United States and double its exports into the US.

How Tease works with corporate teams

Tease runs a corporate gifting program separate from its retail storefront. Buyers can order custom branded tea blends, gift sets, and custom-designed accessories, with low minimums, volume discount pricing, and what the company describes on its own site as fully custom solutions rather than a fixed catalogue. Every blend still runs through Brady’s formulation process as a certified tea sommelier, so a co-branded flavour ships with the same wellness claims as the retail line.

The company’s reach is not small. Tease products are stocked in 600 or more retail doors across Canada and the United States as of mid-2026, and its wellness tea bundles are sold directly through FabFitFun’s subscription boxes. For a corporate buyer, that scale means a gifting partner that already manages production, packing, and fulfillment well past a kitchen-table operation.

Three ways to gift Tease

• Onboarding kits. A Better Than Coffee tin gives a new hire a focus-and-energy ritual for their first week that is not another coffee gift card.
• Client thank-you. A Blissfully Blue butterfly-pea box changes colour with a splash of citrus, which makes it a gift that gets photographed and shared.
• Event favours. A Golden Slumbers travel tin works as a wind-down favour handed out at the end of a conference day.
• Holiday boxes. Glow & Grow paired with the bath soak and body scrub turns into a self-care set for a year-end thank-you.

Frequently asked questions

Is Tease made in Canada?

Yes. Tease is based in Ottawa, Ontario, where Sheena Brady formulates every blend, and the company became the first tea business in Canada to earn Certified B Corporation status.

Can we add our logo to a Tease order?

Yes. Tease’s corporate gifting program includes custom branded tea blends, gift sets, and custom-designed accessories built for company orders rather than the retail shelf.

What order quantities work for a corporate gift?

Tease advertises low minimums and volume discount pricing on its corporate program, with quantities that scale from a small onboarding batch to a bulk holiday order.

Is Tease actually certified, or is that just marketing?

It is certified. Tease earned an initial B Impact score of 99.3 in 2021 and recertified in 2024 at 108.4, both well above the 80-point pass threshold, and it holds the distinction of being the first Certified B Corporation tea company in Canada.

Ten years after Sheena Brady left her day job, Tease is still built around the idea that started it: tea and botanicals formulated for a specific outcome, backed by a certification a buyer can verify rather than take on faith. For a gifting program that needs sustainability claims it can stand behind, a checked certification box does more work than a nice-sounding one.