These cool, cute and disposable sea turtle shaped tea bags exude delicious Blue Jasmine Tea that turns your teacup into a tasteful tropical aquarium.
Bored with plain old pillow-shaped tea bags? Well, snooze brews are history thanks to Ocean-Teabag! The innovative start-up firm based in Toda City, Japan has given the humble tea bag an extreme makeover and we're lovin' the results!
Back in 2015, Ocean-Teabag's founders floated a crowd-funding trial balloon on Makuake for a dolphin-shaped teabag filled with Yabe tea, a sweet green tea from Kumamoto prefecture. The project succeeded beyond all expectations, raising FIVE TIMES the original 500,000 yen (about $6,000) funding goal.
Fast-forward three years and Ocean-Teabag has completed the leap from nifty concept to even-niftier niche business. The company offers several dozen tea bag designs ranging from prehistoric creatures to today's fave pets and animals including cats, foxes and sea otters.
Each type of creature is matched with a compatible, high-quality tea since an essential motivation for the company founders was sparking renewed interest in tea-drinking itself. Making tea-drinking fun AND photogenic is an ideal way to raise awareness among today's Instagram-oriented youth demographic.
Environmental concerns are also on the new generation's radar, and Ocean-Teabag has addressed this issue by making their teabags fully biodegradable from bag to tag. The latter, by the way, are die-cut from cardboard into complementary shapes: a fish or fishbone for the cat teabag, a scallop shell for the otter, and a tropical leaf for the sea turtle just to name a few.
Speaking of the latter, just imagine the amused smiles and collective oohs & ahhs you'll get when you dip a Sea Turtle Blue Jasmine tea bag into a glass carafe filled with hot water. “It creates a aquarium-like pot of tea as the water turns blue and the turtle floats inside,” to quote the product page at OMG Japan. Cool, huh? Now you don't have to BE the boss to drink tea LIKE a boss.
