When Jessie Dean and Alexandra Sangster met in the summer of 2024, they made a pact. The two women both ran tea companies – Dean’s Asheville Tea Company in North Carolina and Sangster’s Sarjesa, more than 2,300 miles away in Calgary, Canada – and they pledged to support each other if their businesses ever needed it.
“The first time I spoke to her, I was like, ‘If something happens to your teabag machine, I’ll make your tea,’” Sangster said. “And if something happens to mine, you can make my tea.”
Neither expected that to become a reality so quickly.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville and surrounding areas in western North Carolina, washing out roads, destroying homes and killing dozens of people. The Asheville Tea Company building was near the Swannanoa River, and despite not being in a flood zone, was completely washed away when the river rose more than 20ft above its normal level.
“I texted Jessie as the hurricane was happening and was like, ‘I don’t want you to worry about this. We’ll get through it,’” Sangster said.
“When I called Alexandra, she was like, ‘We’ll make your tea, I’ve got you, and we’ll figure it out together,’” said Dean, who started Asheville Tea Company with her sister, Melissa, in 2016. “Which is such a profound thing to hear in that moment, and so supportive logistically and emotionally.”
Sangster made good on that promise, and within a month – just in time for the Christmas rush – Sarjesa’s factory in Calgary, Alberta, was blending, processing and packaging all of Asheville Tea Company’s tea. And it has continued to do so for nearly two years – even as tariffs and an uncertain economic environment have thrown more challenges their way.
This fall, Dean will open a new facility in Asheville, finally transferring the manufacturing back home. Her relationship with Sangster kept the business alive, but the experience of being so deeply enmeshed in each other’s supply chains has opened the door to future collaboration and expanded their community. “We talk a lot about how we can not just pay lip service to the thought of supporting each other, but how we can truly help to raise everyone’s bottom line, and help us all to be successful,” Dean said.
This type of cross-border relationship – particularly in the wake of a disaster – is rare, particularly because the bonds that small business owners often forge are with others in their community. “You want those ties, but because they’re geographically co-located, that really becomes hard when there’s a huge event like a hurricane, and everyone is in a place of disadvantage – not only in their small business but in their personal life,” said Jennifer Helgeson, a National Institute of Standards and Technology research economist who studies disaster resilience and how people make decisions about risk.
She notes that after a disaster, businesses already in debt or those without cash reserves have a much harder time recovering, particularly as insurance and government aid are increasingly unreliable. “Some of [those funds] take so much time to come in,” she said. “You really do need relationships.”
That was certainly true for Asheville Tea Company, which lost all of its inventory, equipment and materials when the building was swept away. They were leasing the facility, so insurance didn’t cover their flood losses, and they haven’t received any federal relief funds. But Dean stressed how much their customers and community rallied around the business, raising donations and grants that covered about 50% of the losses (she declined to disclose the total amount raised).
Researchers often break social capital down into bonding (close friends and family), bridging (relationships that connect people across different social groups or networks), and linking (connections to people with power and resources). Daniel Aldrich is a professor at Northeastern University who studies social capital and resilience, and he stresses that all three are essential for recovering from disaster. The relationship between Dean and Sangster is an example of a bridging tie, he said, which comes from “deliberate spaces that [bring people] together”.
In this case, that space was the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, where Dean and Sangster first met. Run by Ann Armbrecht, the program emphasizes holistic sustainability within herb farming – values and practices that center the wellbeing of both the land and the people growing and harvesting herbs. In the summer of 2024, a cohort of 40 people from all along the herbal supply chains met in Oregon to “deepen connections with the place where we are, with ourselves, with the people and the plants, and then see what arises”, Armbrecht said. While she wasn’t present for the conversation between Dean and Sangster, her goal for the week was to “create a container where people bring their whole selves and are vulnerable”.
In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Sangster said the very reason she made the pact with Dean was because “I was super intimidated by her. It was meant to totally quash any sort of fear between the two of us.”
While Sangster’s immediate commitment to support Dean was a lifeline, the two companies still had to figure out how to make the logistics work.
Sarjesa owns two other beverage brands and does contract manufacturing for small tea firms at its Alberta facility. Sangster said they ended up adding an extra shift just to keep up with the orders. “Not only does your team need to adjust, you have double the maintenance and have to add extra systems,” she said. “It was like this MBA in chaos.” To accommodate the added labor and processing, Dean and Sangster worked out a payment plan that was doable as Asheville Tea Company worked to rebuild.
In early 2025, Donald Trump’s tariffs went into effect, further complicating things, as Asheville Tea Company was sending the raw materials up to Canada, and Sarjesa was sending the completed products back. “We kept going with it because what else were we supposed to do?” Sangster said. “The trickiest part wasn’t making the teabags because we have that capacity. It was the blending of the two supply chains in a way that we could navigate the regulations.”
While the raw materials themselves were exempt from tariffs, Dean said costs like brokerage and shipping fees went up as a result. Things are only going to get more complicated with the latest round of tariffs: 50% US tariffs went into effect on many Canadian products last month, while Canada’s tariffs on the US will hit on 8 September.
“It’s exhausting,” Dean said. “We’re trying to navigate all these changes all the time when we’re already pivoting constantly and trying to recover from this massive natural disaster.”
Dean isn’t sure how more tariffs will affect her business. She thinks most of the raw materials will continue to be exempt, but the company needs to determine whether “packaging or specific herbal ingredients that are traveling back and forth” might now have these additional costs. Earlier this month, Asheville Tea incurred a hefty bill on materials Sarjesa sent from Canada. Dean is trying to determine if they were levied in error. Regardless, she anticipates significant tariffs on Japanese equipment needed for her new Asheville facility.
But despite these challenges, significantly altering the supply chain wasn’t an option for Dean. “Our mission is to work with local and regional farmers who are using regenerative agricultural methods and building up their own communities. So we didn’t want to have the bottom fall out of that either.”
Small businesses have a particular connection to their communities that can help with the broader recovery, Aldrich says. “With a lot of the local mom-and-pop businesses, the person is from the area. They want to rebuild. They have a very strong motivation to be there,” he said. “Those people will fight like hell to make sure that not only they recover, but people around them recover.”
Asheville Tea Company has a core team of just six full-time workers, and Dean said they were able to bring everyone back after a short hiatus. The part-time and contract employees are being slowly rehired as the company ramps up for its reopening.
The company’s new location is in the former Moog Music factory in Asheville, a 4,400-square-foot facility that used to manufacture synthesizers. When Dean first leased the building, she called Sangster and asked if she would fly down to help figure out the floor plan. “That’s the best part about having friends that are so intimately acquainted with the business,” Sangster says. “We can talk about things like, ‘Do we put the air compressor on the roof, or do we leave it in the facility?’” Since they were essentially designing the space from scratch, they were able to consider not just where the business is now, but what it will become in the future.
Experts say the relationship the two women built – and the way it’s enabled Asheville Tea Company to survive – is unusual. “They were really thinking from the beginning about resilience and risk reduction, even if it was in passing,” Helgeson said, noting that planning for disasters and having hard conversations isn’t something that comes naturally to many people.
Even before the hurricane, Dean was acutely aware of the need for “having redundancies and backups and various plan Bs”. For both her and Sangster, it’s vital to have relationships that are collaborative, not competitive. In addition to the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, they’re also part of a group of female tea founders who meet regularly to talk about their lives, their businesses and how they might better support one another.
“Companies grow in size and then they need private investment and that forces them on a particular path,” Armbrecht said. “And so what other models can we create? What Jessie and Alexandra have done is an example of that. It’s, ‘How can we collaborate?’ It’s not, ‘How can I swallow you?’”
