TWG Tea co-founders Taha Bouqdib and Maranda Barnes celebrate a decade in Singapore at the helm of a company that has put a vogue spin on an ancient beverage, and tell Hong Xinyi about how they created a worldwide brand
All romantic comedies kick off with what screenwriters call a “meet cute”—when boy encounters girl and sparks start to fly. Taha Bouqdib and Maranda Barnes have a really good meet cute, as we find out when we ask the couple behind TWG Tea about their first encounter.
Maranda, who is originally from Chicago, started violin lessons when she was three years old, and moved to France in her teens to study French while attending the Conservatoire de Paris, before studying comparative literature at The American University of Paris. During her years in the French capital, she frequented tea salons, and it was in one of them that she first encountered Taha.
A Frenchman of Moroccan descent, Taha had been working in the tea industry since he was 23 years old. When the two met, he was an executive at a Parisian tea specialist. “Over the next four years, we would always say bonjour when we saw each other in the salon and exchange a little bit of small talk. Towards my last semester of university, I happened to be in the salon alone, and he told me later that it was the first time I had been there without my parents or friends,” Maranda recalls, the happy memory lighting up her face. Taha, who was no fool, seized this rare opportunity to ask her out. “I said yes, obviously, and the rest is kind of history.”
Maranda, who radiates bubbly warmth, recounts this story for us as she gets dolled up for our cover shoot in TWG Tea on the Bay at Marina Bay Sands, while Taha slips out briefly to check on the brand’s other tea salon in the integrated resort. When he returns to get groomed for the camera, we grab the chance to ask him for his memory of the couple’s meet cute.
“We met in Paris, around a cup of tea,” he says, with the gentlest of smiles, and that is about all we can coax out of him. The courtly discretion of his version is quite endearing, but he proves much more forthcoming when the focus shifts to the story behind TWG Tea.
(Related: An Inventive Gastronomic Experience At TWG Tea)
Taha and Maranda got married in Paris in 2003. By then, the former had been a Parisian for over 20 years, and “at the time, I was sure that I would never leave Paris”, he says. But a year later, an opportunity to start a new tea label in Singapore presented itself. At that point, Taha and Maranda had just become parents—their son Adam is now 15 years old—and it was this personal milestone that made a leap into entrepreneurship that much more appealing for them.
“We had some complementary talents,” says Maranda. She had accumulated several years of experience in marketing and communications, while Taha was well versed in not just the tea trade, but also the world of luxury retail. “We just felt, why were we working for other companies when we could be doing something amazing together? When we had Adam, we thought: ‘Now is the time to start something of our own. We have another generation we are responsible for now, it’s not just about us anymore.’”
Building their own business would also allow them to spend more time with each other, a prospect Taha welcomed wholeheartedly. “Many couples are afraid to work together, but they don’t know how comfortable this can be when it comes to making decisions,” he says. “When I have doubts about something, I know she will tell me the truth. That is a big help.”
