The Republic of Tea: How an Idea Becomes a Business

"The Republic of Tea" is a fly-on-the-wall’s inside view of how a groundbreaking business was started. In what Fortune Magazine termed a “wildly creative” exchange with their young operating partner, Mel and Patricia Ziegler, founders of Banana Republic, reveal in real time, through faxes, sketches, and ruminations how they brainstormed the birth of the company that spawned the specialty tea movement. The reader is privy from day one to a process Tom Peters calls “charming, eccentric, profound, practical, lovely and unique.” It’s all here—the epiphanies and the doubts of how an iconic brand grew out of the spark of an idea, from product to packaging to distribution, in a book voted “one of the hundred best business books of all time.”