How PerfectTed’s Marisa Poster Built A $67 Million Matcha Brand For The Anxious Age

Marisa Poster, shot for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Awards 2026

Veuve Clicquot Bold Awards

There’s no two ways about it: matcha is everywhere. In gym bags, in offices, in cafés that once deemed it ‘too specialist’. In cans, powders, pods and lattes. In the intersection of several shifts that have been building for years (see: coffee fatigue, functional drinks, increasing conversations around anxiety, et al), and few founders have understood that intersection as commercially as Marisa Poster.

In 2021, the New York-born and London-based entrepreneur launched PerfectTed, then a one-SKU matcha company, with her husband Levi Levenfiche and brother-in-law Teddie Levenfiche. Just five years on, the brand now boasts a £50M ($67M) ARR, stockists spanning more than 30,000 retail and café locations in 50+ countries, and a product catalogue including everything from ceremonial-grade powders to RTD lattes and Europe’s first matcha Nespresso pods.

For Poster, now recognised as a 2026 Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award finalist, the growth has been deeply personal. “Like most people, I was drinking coffee and constantly riding that cycle of jitters and crashes,” she says. “I didn’t realise how much it was affecting my focus and anxiety until I switched to matcha and, for the first time, felt genuinely steady.”

Poster clocked it long before most retailers, too. Matcha had already become part of her daily routine in the US, where she relied on it to help her manage energy and focus without exacerbating anxiety, but when she moved to London in 2020, she found the routine much more difficult to maintain. “Here, it was either impossible to find, overpriced, or of really poor quality. The category barely existed, and most people didn’t even know it was an option,” she says.

An origin story that may sound neat in hindsight, but Poster is careful not to over-polish it. She didn’t arrive in London with a fully-formed D2C strategy or a polished pitch for a new era of caffeine. “I moved here for love, and just couldn’t find matcha!” she admits. “I lasted about 45 days before it became a genuine problem.”

That problem, somewhat inevitably, became her business. Coffee, as Poster notes, is one of the most entrenched habits in the world, with “over 2 billion cups” consumed every day, and Poster knew she didn’t need to convert every coffee drinker to matcha to succeed. She just needed to understand the smaller, but still enormous, proportion of people who loved caffeine and hated the crash, jitters or anxiety that—for some—come with it.

“I think the best businesses come from a very specific kind of gap, when someone experiences a need that isn’t being met by the current market,” she says. “That’s all a ‘gap in the market’ really is. It’s not abstract. It’s personal.”

Because of this, Poster also understood that matcha had an experience problem as much as an awareness problem. “The reality is, if your first matcha is bad, it can put you off for life,” she says. “And in the UK, for a long time, that’s what people were experiencing, low-quality, poorly prepared matcha. So it never had a chance to stick.”

That early insight way key in shaping PerfectTed’s approach. It was not enough to make matcha available; the brand had to make good matcha available, and make the first encounter convincing enough to change behaviour. Poster speaks passionately about working closely with café partners to make sure matcha is prepared properly, because “one great latte can convert someone instantly,” and the same thinking sits behind PerfectTed’s ready-to-drink products, where the consumer doesn’t need to master whisking, water temperature or ratios.

Still, consumers weren’t necessarily the hardest audience to convince. Retailers were. They saw matcha as “too niche” and, in hindsight, Poster says that was an advantage. “It meant there was real white space, no one had properly built the category yet.”

With that said, when asked what nearly broke as PerfectTed scaled, Poster is blunt: “Everything operational.

“At the very beginning, even getting the product made was a challenge,” she says. “Matcha was still seen as niche, so factories didn’t prioritise it. We actually had our original product pulled from production because a much bigger, more established brand took priority. That was a real wake-up call, realising how far down the list you are when you’re small.”

Then there were the technical challenges. “Matcha literally clogged the machines in early production,” Poster says. “It’s not an easy ingredient to work with at scale.”

Not too long after, the PerfectTed’s Dragon’s Den appearance brought a different kind of pressure. The company achieved history with a full-board set of offers in 2023, giving the business exposure, validation and an unimaginable level of expectation. “Before, we were just trying to survive,” she says. “After, there was this immediate pressure to become what people thought we already were. The bar moved overnight. It forces you to grow into a version of yourself faster than feels comfortable.”

As demand exploded, the company had to absorb the fall-out in real time. “We were in warehouses packing orders ourselves, running out of stock, dealing with customer chaos,” she says. “Scaling doesn’t break in obvious places, it breaks in the gaps you didn’t even know existed.”

Poster isn’t coy about the scrutiny that comes with being young and female in such a challenging space, either. “You walk into a room and you can feel it,” she says. ‘You’re being assessed before you’ve even spoken. How you look, how you sound, whether you’re ‘credible enough’ to be running the business you’re running.”

Thankfully, her response hasn’t been to change or minimise herself into a more familiar shape. “You have two choices at that point: shrink to fit it, or completely ignore it,” she says. “I’ve chosen to ignore it.

“If anything, it’s made me sharper,” she says. “More prepared, more self-aware, more intentional in how I show up. But I’m not interested in moulding myself into what people expect a founder to look or sound like. I’d much rather build something exceptional, and let that do the talking.”

Poster’s 2026 Bold Future Award nomination is not merely another line in a founder biography, either. It follows being named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in 2024, Global British Entrepreneur of the Year in 2025 and a standout position on the FEBE Growth 100. She is not a deserving female entrepreneur, but a deserving entrepreneur, full stop.

She is also unusually candid about what that pressure does to a person, too. “The most anxious [I’ve felt]… is actually when everything looks great on paper,” she says.

“I’ve always been very open about my experience with anxiety and depression, and they don’t just show up when things are going badly,” Poster says. “Sometimes they’re loudest when everything is going well, and that disconnect between external success and internal reality is incredibly difficult to navigate.”

It is a generous admission—particularly in a culture that continues to prefer vulnerability once it has been resolved, packaged and made instructive. Poster does not frame her own anxiety for branding, nor success as its cure. She frames it as something to manage alongside the work. “It’s not a business problem you can solve with a strategy deck,” she says. “It’s something you have to learn to manage alongside everything else.”

The additional intensity of PerfectTed being a family business, particularly considering the pressure of rapid growth, high visibility and constant decision-making, can’t be overlooked, either. The unspoken rule, Poster says, is “radical honesty, fast.

“If something’s off, we deal with it immediately, even if it’s uncomfortable.” Then comes the more human addendum: “Also… you have to find ways to not make everything about the business. We’re still working on that one!”

In fact, what people don’t realise when looking at double-digit millions and such rapid growth, is how scrappy PerfectTed really was (“and still is!”).

“People hear ‘matcha saved me’ and picture this calm, wellness, Pinterest moment,” she says. “It really wasn’t that. It was me in a kitchen, covered in green powder, making drinks that tasted genuinely terrible, Googling ‘how do you start a drinks company?’ at midnight, and getting ignored or rejected by pretty much everyone.”

Now she and her family are on the other side of it—or have a better view from the same side, at the very least—the next stage is clear. Rather than an acquisition or an exit, Poster is focused on “making matcha mainstream globally. Not as a trend, but as a default. If someone reaches for energy, matcha should be as normal as coffee!”

It is an ambitious desire, but a plausible one. The demand is there. The product is great. And a brand built on those foundations, with a founder who understands why people reach for caffeine as much as what they really want from it, is far more interesting than a pretty green pick-me-up. Matcha may be everywhere now, but if Poster has anything to do with it, the mainstreaming has only just begun.