A Moveable Feast

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 their global ambitions.

- Hong Xinyi

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.”