How a matcha brand became a reflection of everything we believe in: purity, duality and being unapologetically yourself.
Mazu started with matcha. But looking back, matcha was never really the whole story.
I had wanted to start my own matcha brand for a while. I loved how pure the product was, how much it suited me, and (at the time) how new it still felt. I saw the opportunity to build a world around it. To take something incredibly pure and package it in a way that felt cool, modern and desirable. So I jumped.
I didn't know everything there was to know about matcha. I didn't have the perfect business plan mapped out. I just knew: this feels like me. This is what I want to do.
With the help of The Vitalforce Group, I started building. And the first version of Mazu was… very different. It was bold. Loud. Masculine. Almost more like a protein or performance brand than the Mazu you see today. And objectively, there was nothing wrong with it. It looked sharp. It had a solid foundation. But it didn't have a soul. Or at least, it didn't have mine.
I really felt that for the first time when I started thinking about selling Mazu B2B. I looked at the brand and realised I didn't have that feeling of I am so proud to put this in front of someone. There was a disconnect.
I thought I needed to redesign the brand.
What I actually needed was to redefine it. At first, it would have been easy to change the colours, soften the logo and turn Mazu into another beautiful beige matcha brand. But that wouldn't have been me either. Because I am not only soft. I am not only feminine, calm, spiritual. I can also be intense. Direct. Loud. Masculine. And for a long time, I struggled with that.
I spent years trying to become a very specific version of myself. Everything clean. Everything perfect. Everything according to a schedule, a routine or a regime. And whenever the other side of me showed up, I felt like I had somehow failed at being the person I was trying to become.
If I wanted to be spiritual, surely, I shouldn't also want to drink, smoke or party.
If I cared about wellbeing, shouldn't all my choices look like wellness?
If I was disciplined, could I also be completely spontaneous?
Somewhere along the way, I had created a version of balance that was just restriction. And Mazu forced me to look at it. Because every time I tried to push the brand into one direction, it felt incomplete. It took me almost a year to understand why.
I didn't need to choose grey. I needed to allow black and white to exist at the same time. That became the foundation of Mazu.
Unapologetic. Pure. Duality.
Not balance in the sense of becoming less of everything. But giving every side of yourself the space to exist.
Building MAZU meant letting go. A lot.
The look and feel changed. The logo changed. The branding changed. The idea behind the brand changed. Even the role of matcha itself changed. At times, that process felt like standing still. Especially when you are building a business, there is always pressure to move faster. Sell more. Scale. Push content. Become an e-commerce company. Optimise everything. That was initially much closer to what I thought Mazu would become. But it didn't feel right.
So instead of pushing it, I gave it time. And that might have been one of the most important decisions I made. Because Mazu didn't need to grow faster. It needed time to evolve. The same thing was happening to me personally. I was learning to release control. To release restriction. To live much more in the moment and to stop punishing myself for not fitting into one identity all the time. It felt incredibly vulnerable at first. But eventually, it started to feel good.
Matcha was the starting point. Not the destination.
At some point, I realised I had far too many ideas to fit into a matcha brand. There are so many pure ingredients, rituals and products I love and I kept thinking: why does something natural so often have to look dusty? Why are we still choosing between the beautiful product and the pure product? I wanted both.
Pure ingredients. No unnecessary additives. Products that stay close to their origin. But packaged in a way you want to put on your kitchen counter, throw into your bag and tell your friends about.
And then came the final piece: community.
Once I let go of the idea that Mazu had to revolve around matcha, I started questioning the way I wanted to build the brand altogether. I didn't want to manufacture a community through content. I didn't want to create an audience first and then try to sell them a lifestyle. I wanted it to happen the other way around. What would happen if we simply brought women together offline? Connected to each other. What if Mazu could create the setting, and the community could grow organically from there? My longtime friend Puck van Opdorp helped me define and build the idea:
A place where women connect, learn from each other and don't have to edit parts of themselves before walking through the door.
Where they can be both: soft and intense.
Spiritual and hedonistic.
Ambitious and completely unserious.
A mother, founder, creative, party girl, yogi — (sometimes) all in the same week.
I want people to leave a Mazu experience thinking: Wow. That was so pure. So non-judgemental. And so fucking cool.
Today, Mazu is transforming from a matcha seller into a community-based wellbeing brand. We're still building it and I'm glad we are. Because maybe Mazu will never be one finished, perfectly defined thing. Neither are we. So, if you've ever felt like you had to choose between different versions of yourself, you might recognise something here. You don't have to choose. You can be both. And if that feels familiar, Mazu is probably being built for you too.
Come discover what we're creating and join us at our next Mazu gathering.
