Founder & Creative Director
Taste Where You Stand.
théden is an independent tea-blending brand built around one idea: a cup of tea as an emotional refuge — a den.
I developed the recipes and the brand myself, and brought them to market with an OEM production partner. From the idea to the cup, it’s the first brand I’ve carried through from end to end as its author.
What I did on this project
Brand strategy · Naming · Recipe & blend development · Art direction (with a design collaborator) · Editorial & process documentation · Go-to-market
Why tea, and why now
My grandma used to brew huge batches of goji berry tea and fill three old Del Monte glass bottles with it. She never let me have sweet snacks, but the warm, nutty, slightly sweet tea lingered on my young taste buds. Instead of craving treats, I got into the habit of gulping down drinks.
In high school, I bought so much bottled barley tea that the snack bar owner nicknamed me “Sky Barley Buddy.” In college, I went all in, brewing four or five black tea bags at once in a grande tumbler and using over ten bags a day. (thinking stronger flavor proves my gourmet quality )
My first job in Korea was in Seochon, the west-side village of Gyeongbok Palace. The neighborhood was filled with charming cafés, each with its own flair. I ended up spending a good chunk of my modest salary on coffee.
They say you can tell who someone is by where their money goes. By that measure, what defined me was drinks.
I figured I might as well drink with intention — so I began studying tea in earnest. From the biting winter winds to the sweltering summer heat, I’ve dedicated every Saturday to learning.
Blended teas combine ingredients from various global sources, often manufactured far from their original locations. Thus, a culturally informed perspective is essential. Most of all, the flavor and aroma of a tea speak to different people in different ways—what works for me might not for someone else.
Delving into the study of tea has provided me with valuable insights that extend far beyond enjoying a cup. As I discovered the unique ways each person experiences taste and aroma, I recognized this as a powerful practice in honoring our differences.
Curation. Locality. Cross-border complexity. The discipline that as long as I like it is never enough. Everything I’d spent years working with in art and research was already sitting inside the cup. Hence, théden is another form of the work I’ve always done.
The brand
The paradise théden defines sits right where you are standing. It is a real, abundant place, not a mythic utopia you can never reach. I call this Lived Eden. Rather than staging the story of Adam and Eve as an abstraction, the brand holds a present attitude: living inside that abundance with your attention fully on your own senses. In the time it takes a cup to steep, I hope your place becomes a garden of its own, a Tea Eden, and at the same time the deepest refuge of the mind, The Den.
DEN LINE
Inward stillness, quiet immersion. Deep, layered blends.
EDEN LINE
Outward energy, open welcome. Bright, luminous blends.
The slogan ‘Taste Where You Stand’ compresses that attitude into a single line. Taste is the palate, and it is preference, and it is the aesthetic judgment we mean in English when we say someone has good taste. Where you stand is the physical spot you occupy, a phase of life, and a coordinate of values. So the slogan performs one action: from where you stand right now, with the senses you have, taste this moment.
The blends: designing sensation with aroma molecules
théden’s blending begins at the level of aroma molecules. Each blend is built as a single inner coordinate for a specific sensory experience. Whether you sip the same tea in a Seoul café or a Tokyo studio apartment, the sensation is made to resonate with your inner state rather than the space around you. This is how Taste Where You Stand actually works.
Noir Mint is the flagship that shows this approach most directly. Menthol together with the mirror-image isomers of L- and D-carvone builds a structure that reads cool yet dark, sweet yet bitter. That paradox carries the complexity of where you stand into sensation. It suits the place where mid-thirties ambition and fatigue sit together, where you love your work and stay unsure of it.
Each blend still to come is planned to take a different dimension of the slogan. Learning to blend showed me more than once that taste and craft are separate things. Because I tend to avoid sweet or heavy flavors, so my early blends often ended up under-characterized. Tea isn’t fine art; it has to make sense to the person drinking it. Character, I relearned again and again, blooms on top of fundamentals. That principle led into the way I now design sensation with aroma molecules.
Development & production
I developed théden’s recipes myself, on top of six months of tea-sommelier and blending study — keeping botanicals restrained to let each origin’s character lead, and rebalancing many times to resist the ‘as long as I like it’ trap.
To turn those recipes into a real product, I partnered with the OEM manufacturer Ecoteav. We agreed that the planning and branding rights stay with me, while the precise blend ratios and raw-material sourcing sit with Ecoteav — keeping the idea and the brand fully mine, while a specialist partner handles reliable production.
Packaging developed with Hyperpension. / Key rendition: translating the feeling of a ‘den’ into color and texture.
Packaging was a collaboration with a designer, Hyperpension, who goes by the slogan “Earth is a Hyper-sized pension,” where every beings are temporary residents of this shared place called Earth.
Positioning
théden aims for the niche between mass commercial teas such as Osulloc or Twinings and the ultra-premium world of traditional tea ceremony that stays out of easy reach. Its reference points sit closer to niche perfume and beauty houses like Le Labo than to conventional F&B, in market approach and visual language alike. The idea is to let scent and taste be experienced in the language of taste and lifestyle. Its core readers are urban thirty- and forty-somethings in sensory professions, including curators, editors, designers, and writers, along with those who share that sensibility and whose sense of where they stand stays fluid through travel and relocation.
The First Blend: Noir Mint
BASE
Black tea from Uva (Sri Lanka) and Nilgiri (India).
A cool menthol clarity from Uva, woven with floral Nilgiri, frames the dark contour of ‘Noir.’
MIDDLE/TOP
Spearmint, yerba maté, fennel.
A cooling that spreads without bite. Leaf-green clears the palate.
ACCENT
Cacao nibs and coffee beans, layered with chocolate and tiramisu notes.
When the first chill settles, what remains is the long depth of dessert.
“A blend in which all five tastes are felt in balance within a single cup, each ingredient’s character revealed with delicacy.”
— Judges’ citation, 2025 Korea Tea Championship
What this project shows
We live in a time when we favor consuming finished products over creating things with our own hands.
Regretting this trend, at first I wanted to make everything with my own hands. But bringing a real product to market taught me a subtler distinction: what has to be yours isn’t every physical step, but the authorship — the idea, the recipe, the brand. So I developed the recipes and the brand myself, and kept creative ownership while entrusting production to a specialist partner.
Authenticity isn’t about unearthing some dormant truth buried within ourselves. Maybe it instead resonates with the unique patterns we weave—the knots we tie through chance encounters, the people we meet, the places where we put down roots or simply pass through, and how we continue threading these experiences together until we become some distinctive kind of fabric.
To strengthen that fabric of selfhood, we’d better cultivate deeper cohesion with everything we relate to. This cannot be achieved through secondary experiences like digital interactions or instant gratification.
It must be forged through the immediate and physical: through direct touching, seeing, hearing, and the genuine exchange of hearts in real, lived experience.
Not through every moment dictated by algorithms, but through the essential kind of digging—in the truest sense of the word.
théden is that belief poured into a cup of tea. How an idea becomes an object, how a narrative becomes an experience — the questions I hold onto in every brand and content project, carried this time from start to finish under my own name.
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Credits & links
Role — Founder & Creative Director: brand strategy, naming, recipe & blend development, art direction, editorial, go-to-market
Production — OEM partner Ecoteav (precise blend ratios & sourcing)
Design — Hyperpension (logo, logotype, package design)
Rights — Planning & branding copyright: held by me / blend & sourcing rights: Ecoteav
Period — 2026–present
Qualifications — Tea Sommelier · Tea Blending Level 1 (Tea Association of Korea)
Links — Instagram @theden_lab / Crowdfunding: Wadiz
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