The brand stored in some searches as "david tea" is properly written DavidsTea, a Canadian specialty tea retailer founded in 2008 in Montreal. It built its name on a vast, playful range of flavored loose-leaf teas, bright candy-store retail, and a loyalty club called Frequent Steeper. After a hard pandemic restructuring in 2020, it reinvented itself as mainly an online and wholesale business. This is the story of where the brand came from, what it sells, and why tea drinkers around the world still recognize the colorful tins.
The DavidsTea story in brief
DavidsTea was started by two cousins, David Segal and Herschel Segal. Herschel was already a well-known Canadian retail figure, the founder of the fashion chain Le Chateau, and he backed his younger cousin's idea for a fun, approachable tea shop. The brand itself takes its name from David. The first store opened on Queen Street in Toronto in 2008, with the first Montreal location following in 2009. The head office stayed in Montreal, which is still where the company is based.
The pitch was simple and a little cheeky: tea did not have to be stuffy. Instead of a narrow shelf of black and green, DavidsTea leaned hard into flavor, color, and discovery. That positioning fueled fast growth across Canada and into the United States. The company listed publicly on the Nasdaq stock exchange in June 2015, when it operated roughly 160 stores, and it kept expanding from there. At its peak, going into 2020, it ran about 240 stores across the two countries.
The brand's whole personality was built on making tea feel like a treat to explore, not a chore to learn.
Who owns and runs DavidsTea
DavidsTea trades publicly, so it is not privately held by a single owner. The Segal family has remained closely tied to the business. Herschel Segal was the largest shareholder and a driving force for years; he died in 2025 at the age of 94. Sarah Segal, Herschel's daughter, became Chief Executive Officer and Chief Brand Officer in December 2020, taking over from her father and steering the company through its post-pandemic reinvention. Before that she had led the candy retailer Squish and served on the DavidsTea board. As with many public companies, leadership and family shareholders have not always agreed, and governance disputes have surfaced in the press over the years.
A quick timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2008 | Founded by cousins David and Herschel Segal; first store opens on Queen Street, Toronto |
| 2009 | First Montreal store opens; head office established in Montreal |
| 2015 | Lists on the Nasdaq (ticker DTEA) in June, with roughly 160 stores |
| Early 2020 | Reaches a peak of about 240 stores across Canada and the United States |
| 2020 | Files for creditor protection; closes most stores and exits US retail |
| 2020 | Sarah Segal named CEO and Chief Brand Officer |
What DavidsTea is known for
If you have ever walked past a DavidsTea, you remember it. The brand became famous for a few signature things that set it apart from a traditional tea merchant.
The Tea Wall and the loose-leaf range
The centerpiece of a DavidsTea store was the "Tea Wall," a grid of large tins you could open, sniff, and sample before buying. It made browsing tea feel sensory and fun rather than intimidating. Behind that wall sat one of the brand's biggest draws: a sprawling catalog of flavored loose-leaf blends, often well over a hundred at a time, rotating with the seasons. Blends carried whimsical names and bold ingredient mixes, leaning into dessert-like and fruity profiles, and they were sold loose by weight rather than only in tea bags. If you are new to the world of loose leaf versus bagged, our guide on tea leaves versus tea powder explains why the format matters for flavor.
One of its best-known blends, Forever Nuts, is a caffeine-free herbal mix of almond slices, apple, cinnamon, and a touch of beetroot that turns the cup a bright pink. That kind of visual, approachable tea is exactly the niche DavidsTea carved out. Seasonal collections, advent calendars, and limited holiday blends became a yearly ritual for regulars.
Flavored blends, classics, and matcha
Alongside the playful blends, DavidsTea carries the classics: black, green, white, oolong, and a deep bench of herbal and rooibos infusions. It also built a notably large matcha assortment, with both ceremonial and flavored options sourced from Japan, plus accessories like infusers, mugs, and travel tumblers to go with the tea. If matcha is new to you, start with our pillar explainer on what matcha is, then see how to actually prepare and enjoy matcha day to day.
The Frequent Steeper loyalty program
DavidsTea's loyalty club, Frequent Steeper, is part of why customers kept coming back. The basic idea is that you earn points for what you spend, and those points convert into free tea, with a higher status tier for bigger annual spenders. Loyalty has been central to the brand's relationship with regulars, especially as it shifted online. Exact terms and rewards vary by region and change over time.
The 2020 reinvention: from stores to screens
The pandemic hit specialty retail hard, and DavidsTea was no exception. With stores shuttered in early 2020, the company filed for creditor protection under Canada's Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act and undertook a major restructuring. It exited the United States retail market entirely, closing all 42 of its US stores, and shut about 166 of its Canadian locations, shrinking from roughly 240 stores to a small handful.
Rather than disappearing, though, the brand pivoted. It refocused on two channels: its own e-commerce site and a wholesale business that puts DavidsTea products on the shelves of thousands of grocery stores and pharmacies. In the year of the restructuring, brick-and-mortar sales fell sharply while e-commerce and wholesale revenue jumped, which is exactly the shift management was betting on. In effect, the colorful mall-store chain became a leaner online retailer and packaged-tea supplier. That is the version of DavidsTea most shoppers interact with today.
How to think about the brand now
- Primarily online. The deepest selection lives on its website, not in a wall of physical tins.
- Available at retail. Select blends turn up on grocery and pharmacy shelves, mostly in Canada.
- Still flavor-forward. The dessert-leaning, seasonal blend identity survived the restructuring intact.
- Region matters. Availability, pricing, and shipping vary by country and retailer; what is easy to buy in one market may be hard to find in another.
How DavidsTea compares to other tea brands
DavidsTea sits in the modern, flavor-led specialty tea space rather than the traditional single-estate or pure-classics camp. Where a Taiwanese chain like Chicha San Chen is built on machine-precise brewing of high-grade leaf, and an old cafe chain like The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is built around drinks served in store, DavidsTea is built around the at-home ritual of choosing, steeping, and gifting flavored tea. Here is a rough sense of where it lands compared with other recognizable names.
| Brand | Origin | Best known for |
|---|---|---|
| DavidsTea | Canada (Montreal, 2008) | Huge flavored loose-leaf range, playful blends, Tea Wall, matcha |
| The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf | USA (Los Angeles, 1963) | Coffee-and-tea cafe chain; iced blended drinks |
| Chicha San Chen | Taiwan | Machine-precise brewing, high-grade loose-leaf, premium bubble tea |
For more on those neighbors, see our stories on The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and the premium Taiwanese chain Chicha San Chen.
Is DavidsTea worth knowing about?
For anyone who enjoys flavored, easy-drinking tea, DavidsTea is one of the more influential names of the past two decades. It helped popularize the idea that tea could be browsed like candy, gifted in cheerful tins, and built around mood and season rather than tradition alone. Its survival story, from mall chain to online-and-wholesale brand, is also a useful case study in how specialty retail adapts.
If the brand has you curious about the wider world of tea, keep exploring: read our overview of the main types of tea, dig into herbal tea types for the caffeine-free side of DavidsTea's range, or learn about the plant behind almost all true tea in our guide to Camellia sinensis.