Our Story

I thought I was building a tea business. I didn't know I was building a lifeline.

It started in Poland.

In 2002, visiting friends in Kielce, I walked into a café with a tea list longer than the drive from Melbourne to Adelaide. I had never taken tea seriously. I left a convert.

Six years later, that moment became Tielka. I had been listening to frustrated tea lovers overlooked by a coffee culture that had forgotten them entirely. They wanted something worth the ritual. In 2009, Tielka released Australia's first certified Fairtrade organic loose leaf tea collection — sourced from high-mountain gardens in China where tea craft had been refined over thousands of years.

The product was exceptional from the beginning.

But the brand found its real meaning on Valentine's Day, 2018.

Our third son arrived by caesarean in the early morning.

I saw his face. His almond-shaped eyes. Thoughts flooded my mind. Within the first few minutes, I knew something was wrong. His breathing was heavy. The midwife couldn't leave his side. Hours later, a doctor flagged what I had already felt: "We think he has Down syndrome." And then the words that undid me — the results could take weeks. The not-knowing. The waiting. The paralysis of a future I couldn't yet see.

A friend came. She held me while I sobbed — raw, undignified. She spoke powerful words, prayers over me. And then something shifted. Not the circumstances. Something underneath them. Peace I had never felt before.

The next day, they found a blockage in his bowel. He was flown to Brisbane for surgery that day.

We followed as a family. Weeks in the Ronald McDonald House. The long walk from our room to the NICU every day. Pain that was physical as much as emotional.

But there was something else—a reservoir.

In the hardest weeks of my life, I had a gentle strength I did not expect. Joy that surfaced in the lights hanging in the trees at South Bank, walking alongside the hospital. A capacity and ease to hold everything that hadn't collapsed under the weight of it.

I understood, eventually, where it came from. Every morning for years, before anyone woke, I had spent the first hour on the back deck. A cup of tea. Music. Prayer. Stillness.

I had been building something without knowing I would need it. When the hardest season arrived, it held.

That is not a backstory. That is the entire brand.

Tielka exists for that hour. The quiet before the noise. The cup that belongs to you before the day takes over. Not because it is indulgent — because it is infrastructure.

You are building something in those mornings. You may not know yet what you are building it for.

16 years. 49 awards. The same organic fair trade tea gardens. One hour, one cup, every morning, that makes everything else possible. 

Rebecca Domorev
Co-Founder and CEO
Tielka