Companiesandme

It's hard for me to believe that the vision of Companiesandme is finally being unveiled today. That vision is to curate the rich stories of companies around us, and to bring us closer to the people behind them. As we unveil the site, I find myself completely inspired by the type of people who have taken the time to share their stories and engage in a real conversation with you. There aren't many places where...

How I fell into tea? Many people ask me how I got into tea. Actually, the question is not so much how did I get into tea but rather how I got into tea after getting into art after getting into engineering. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio after my family immigrated from Baghdad, Iraq when I was five. My father was a doctor who worked around the clock raising his children, putting them through...

People often ask me why I named my company Joie de Vivre. It's an unusual name for an American company, to say the least. It's French. It's hard to spell and to pronounce.  The name came to me when I was 26 and working as a real estate developer, my first job when I graduated from Stanford Business School. I was young and my future by all external indicators was bright, but I wasn't happy....

Although the more drawn out story of Linden Street Brewery has chapters in far flung parts of the globe, it is right here in our own backyard that the true gold was to be found---gold in the form of a long lost brewing tradition just begging to be unearthed and brought back to life.  A golden glow, faded for nearly 50 years, that need only a little polishing and love to realize a new era...

He refined his knowledge of tea as an owner of European teahouses. She is an artist whose hand-painted images grace Numi’s packaging. Many are inspired by his photographs. They launched Numi Organic Tea in the fall of 1999 in Oakland, California after observing that competing brands differed little from one another in quality, innovation, and variety. Numi introduced organic herbs such as Rooibos and Honeybush in the U.S. market, full-leaf teas in teabags, and all-natural,...

Little was known about how food affected the body and the mind’s willingness and ability to learn when I was growing up. In 11th grade, I was allowed to have a coke in class to keep me awake and then fell asleep only to knock the coke on the floor. Since starting 18 Rabbits, I've searched for ways to serve our community in more direct ways than just giving money to a cause. When I...

I have this crazy vision for our studio, and we are all plunging headlong into it.  It began when I was thirty years old and eight months pregnant with my first child. That’s when it finally dawned on me that there wasn’t enough time left in my lifetime to do and learn all of the things that I wanted to do and learn. This realization came out of a struggle with a 9 square foot...

People often ask us "Why do you make your Kombucha with Yerba Mate tea?" and my typical response is "because it's delicious," but I rarely get into all of the details of why Yerba Mate is so special. Grown in the sub-tropical rainforests of Argentina, Brail and Paraguay, yerba mate has long been revered as the “drink of the gods”.  The Pasteur Institute and the Paris Scientific society concluded "it is difficult to find a...

Fame itself has never impressed me, maybe because in my career as a journalist I met so many "personalities". But when I meet someone exceedingly inspiring and generous, I have been known to get star struck – or, rather, "hero struck". It happened several years ago and again last week with Nell Newman, when we worked together shooting a video for Give Something Back and Boise Inc's Paper=Food initiative. P=F donates $1 to an area...

Local is not about buying the same stuff at higher prices from a local vendor. Local is about happiness. I believe that the concept of Local is not well communicated. When people suggest that we "buy local," it comes off as preachy and turns many of us off. How many times have you gone into a corner store and left feeling like you'd been ripped off? The $2 Coke or $1.50 orange may as well be...