Sheena Brady, Business Award
Founder and CEO Tease Wellness
Hospitality Management – Hotel and Restaurant, Class of 2009
Sheena Brady is a Hospitality Management – Hotel and Restaurant program graduate, and a successful entrepreneur. Brady founded Tease Tea, a multi-million-dollar company, and Founder’s Fund, a four-month digital program that provides women access to seed funding and mentorship.
The path to success is not always linear. Before finding success, Sheena struggled in school with undiagnosed ADHD. She found her interest in hospitality while working at a resort in Turks and Caicos. From there, she went on to enrol and graduate from the Hospitality Management – Hotel and Restaurant program at Algonquin College in 2009. After graduation she began her career working for a Michelin Star chef in New York, at the Four Seasons in California, and then eventually landed in Toronto.
Brady began crafting teas in the Toronto hospitality industry where she worked at a luxury hotel. She began formulating her own blends with herbs and ingredients that would further enhance the results of the base blend of tea. She became a certified tea sommelier through the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada, which empowered her to seek genuine well-being solutions to battle her anxiety, digestive issues and insomnia, which excessive coffee consumption only amplified.
“I was learning more about Shangri-La Hotels – they are really kind of known as the Four Seasons experience throughout Asia. It’s an Asian brand. And so naturally, tea at its core is very important to the heart of the company and its core values. This idea of connection and comfort through hospitality, and connection through tea, and community through tea as a vessel was key. Brands like Red Rose and Lipton’s weren’t allowed on the menu, so in the world of tea, I became a professional tea sommelier. Through that experience and developing this program, I realized that ‘Oh, however, you’re feeling there’s a tea or botanical blend to support.’”
With $500 in a Shopify store, and fully self-funded, Tease Tea was born out of Brady’s Toronto condo.
The culture around tea as appealing to Brady, “Take your time, enjoy that experience, watch the colour, take time to steep it, take time to let it cool and so on. So that was really at the core of what Tease was all about: the idea of when you can take time to invest in yourself and your wellbeing, that you’re better equipped to invest in the people and communities around you that are important to you. With that, it was a social enterprise before I even knew what that word meant,” Brady recalled.
“In the early years, it was, building meaningful partnerships and connections with charities or organizations that at their core were elevating women. Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was volunteering my time, sometimes it was products or goods,” Brady said.
This led to the creation of The Founders Fund in 2019. With every purchase at Tease, Brady ensured a portion was invested in the next generation of successful women entrepreneurs. Historically, women have faced barriers gaining access to capital to launch businesses, and Brady is keen to help change this fact.
“All founders have a commonality – it’s in our DNA to want to pay our experiences forward and try to connect the dots for those coming after us,” Brady said.
The Founders Fund has given over $300,000 in grant funding to women-owned businesses, as well as provided mentorship, programming, and educational resources to over 3,000 women founders across Canada.
Brady continues to remain well connected to the Algonquin College community, presenting as a guest speaker in classrooms, participating in a speaker series, and teaching courses in marketing and in the Tea Sommelier program.
Her fiercely tenacious spirit has aided in her success. She has knocked on many doors (figuratively) and some opened and took a chance on her and her business. To that end, Tease Tea has been featured in Forbes, Women’s Health, on Dragon’s Den (CBC), Ellen (the Be Kind box) and on the View.
Brady has two pieces of advice to share with young go-getters, with the first being “done is better than perfect. Ask yourself, what is one thing I can do to move the needle on my business today?” The second is “just keep moving, don’t stop. No matter the challenges faced, whether it be rejections, supply chain issues during the pandemic or other bumps along the road, just keep going.”
Brady is still the same ambitious person she was when she started her career in hospitality more than 10 years ago, and she still serves her clients with the belief that everyone deserves the support to lead their ultimate lives. She was an RBC Momentum Award finalist in 2022 through the Women of Influence.