PZ: Well Mel decided to go away on a meditation retreat for a week; we were both coffee drinkers at that point. The next thing I knew, he came home and he was only drinking tea.

MZ: Well what happened was they didn’t have coffee at this meditation retreat, so I had this excruciating coffee withdrawal headache on the second day of the retreat. Probably the worst headache I’ve ever had in my entire life, and when that headache lifted, I said I’m never going to drink this black swirl again in my life. And instantly the idea for a tea business popped into my head, so I said we’re going to do a tea business and I came home from the retreat I said let’s start a tea business. So like anything else, I mean we use businesses to learn, we learned about tea. We explored it it’s a wonderful product, and we learned all about it and started a business called The Republic of Tea.

PZ: Yes and we wanted to package it in a way that would stand out on the shelf and be a recycled package, something that you would use again and again and we found that tea had been stored in tins, so we found these wonderful round tins where we could print our labels on each one to give it that artisan kind of feel. And I remember there was a decision we really wanted these tins, but until the quantity jumped up they cost us like a dollar a piece, more than the tea, but we figured, if this tea company works then we will be able to buy the larger volume so we gambled on that.

MZ: And it was very playful, it still is, I mean the Republic of Tea has continued in the same spirit unlike Banana Republic, we don’t own it any longer we sold that, but it’s continued in the same spirit, I was the minister of leaves, Patricia was the minister of enchantment, the company now it doesn’t have employees it has ministers. And it’s a lovely company, it continues to this day, and basically there was no specialty tea category at that time, or full leaf tea, if you wanted to buy tea at that time and we started about 25 years ago, you’d go to this market and you could either buy Celestial Seasonings which was a hippie company in Boulder that sold herbal teas, and Lipton or Twinings Tea and that was it there were no other teas on the shelf. And Republic of Tea came in with 21 tins of full leaf tea, and it changed the entire business. Now if you go into a Whole Foods you’ll see there’s a whole section of specialty teas, they all came out of The Republic of Tea. You create a context, I think that’s what we did in both instances that you’re speaking about, is that we created a context, and it was the context in which the business fit. We just didn’t try to fit the business into an existing context, we wanted to go out and make a new context, and then create a business that represented that context.

HKG: True entrepreneurs.

PZ: Well we imagined a world, and here we were new parents, we imagined a slower world, instead of gulp by gulp it was a sip by sip life. And when you took your time and you noticed, you sip tea.

HKG: Amazing, I love it, and then what came?

PZ: We intentionally set out, we had children late in our life, and we wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. And we were lucky enough to be financially independent because of Banana Republic so we just didn’t feel like we had to run out there again and again and again and repeat the same movie. And what we wanted to was enjoy our two children who are now 21 and 25, we’re the kind of parents who have absolutely no regrets, we were there all the time and we are a very close family, love our kids immensely. It was great fun; so basically, you know we went from having 3000 kids, to two kids. And those two kids were much more of a handful, than the 3000 kids. And now they’re young, thriving adults and we’re very happy about that. So we would dip in and dip out of things, and one of the things we dipped in and out of was 1999 in San Francisco was like 1849 in San Francisco, it was the gold rush except it was the dot com stuff that they were mining, we got swept up in it along with everyone else. Venture capitals were throwing money all over the place.

PZ: First Ed came to us and said let’s do something together again. Now Ed was our COO at Banana Republic, so we said we had so much fun let’s do something again.

MZ: We wanted to play with him again, so we decided OK let’s do something, so we invented a business called Zoza and it created a whole new line of clothes. Banana Republic was all about natural fabrics, cotton, really beautiful cotton and wool, but in the intervening years, we live on a mountain and we’re very outdoorsy, I started wearing a lot of Patagonia clothes and a lot of performance clothes because I ride a bike, and I hike and I really saw the virtue of performance fabrics. So we started a business where we would marry Patagonia with Prada, and that’s what Zoza was all about, it was a;; about design using these high tech fabrics. And it was almost like a yoga based line a little bit.

HKG: Yeah sounds like Lululemon a little bit.

PZ: We had free yoga classes in the office at the mornings, you would leave your shoes by the door when you came to work, and it was all white carpeted. We had free yoga class during break.

MZ: And the company zen master, my friend Norman Fisher, high school friend, was also the abbot of the San Francisco zen center, he became the abbot of Zoza, as well.

PZ: And we opened up the offices, right across the freeway from where our kids were going to school so we could pick them up after school and they would come in and help, they were still 12 and 8 at the time.

MZ: So we had a great time with that. Unfortunately, when the dot com wave swept through San Francisco, in those days it cost 5 million dollars to build a website that today costs 5 thousand dollars, so you took so much capital at that point, and when March 2000 came, and the NASDAQ started to really dive, and people started to panic, all financing dried up and we were deep in it. So like a number of other dot com companies of that age we were just swept out to sea.

PZ: We had fabric waiting to go to manufacturing and didn’t get our second round because our investment banker was losing it on another business, so we were just caught high and dry.

MZ: Money dried up.

HKG: So what do you do with all that stuff you’ve got sitting in your warehouse?

MZ: Well we sold it we liquidated everything.

HKG: Well, you’ve seen the highs and the lows.

MZ: I like to say that the seed of success is in every failure, and the seed of failure is in every success, and it’s definitely true. With your success you can get a little bit too arrogant, and in failure, if you’re feeling correctly you’re going to get very enterprising.