The Strategy Behind PerfectTed’s Meteoric Rise

This week, I sat down with Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing at PerfectTed the matcha brand that’s gone from £10k a month to a £50m annualised run rate in just two years. And whilst you may have heard snippets of their story, today we are going to dive into stuff you will have never heard before…

Sound good?
Well grab a matcha, settle in, and let’s break it down

Product led strategy

Before Kelly arrived, PerfectTed was already on a tear. It had grown from £10,000 a month in revenue in early 2023 to an annualised run rate of £50 million just a couple of years later. The driver behind this early success? Amazing founders and product market fit. The three founders are, in Kelly’s words, “incredibly intelligent, very ambitious and driven, but in very different ways.” Marissa is a creative genius and brand visionary; Teddie is, as Kelly put it, “the best salesperson I’ve ever met”; and Levi is the operational and financial anchor who keeps the whole machine running. They play in their lanes, trust one another’s strengths, and together create a leadership team far more powerful than the sum of its parts. Best of all? Each of them understands the power of brand.

Kelly is clear, beyond the brilliant founders, PerfectTed’s success wasn’t luck. It was textbook product market fit that leveraged the power of brand. You see Matcha already existed in the market, but it wasn’t accessible. It was niche, expensive, and branded for health die-hards rather than the younger, anxious, caffeine-sensitive generation who actually needed it most. PerfectTed inverted that model, making matcha more accessible (and desirable) for everyone.

“Before PerfectTed you’ve got maybe Clearspring in health food stores which was £30 for 30 grams of matcha, with quite old-fashioned branding…and then we enter: £10 for 30 grams of matcha with a really fun & dynamic brand”

Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing, Perfect TED

That accessibility, and the price difference, was driven by a brilliant supply-chain strategy. The founders built a model that allowed them to offer high-quality matcha at a much lower price point, and then wrapped it in a bright, disruptive & distinctive brand. A brand that pops on shelf and truly stands out.

What’s most interesting, however, is how this product–market fit ultimately shaped their purpose. A purpose that now guides everything the business does moving forward.

All in on brand

I have long said to many of our clients, from Beavertown Brewery to Clipper Teas , that the best brand strategies are born from a simple product truth. Of course you want to tap into big cultural and consumer tensions, but before all of that you need to ground the brand in a unique truth about the business.

PerfectTed’s purpose is born from a simple product truth, but also allows them to play a much bigger cultural and fame-worthy role. Their purpose? To spread positive energy and make matcha accessible.

On one hand, the idea of spreading positive energy comes directly from the product truth and naturally expands into culture. Matcha delivers a smoother, steadier, calmer kind of caffeine. No crashes, no jitters, no anxiety spikes. At the same time, it ladders up into a much bigger cultural conversation: rising anxiety levels in the UK (and globally), and the growing awareness of how coffee and energy drinks can exacerbate it. It’s a widespread human truth that many of us recognise including one of PerfectTed’s founders, Marissa.

“Matcha literally transformed Marissa’s life…she couldn’t drink coffee or energy drinks because it exacerbated her of anxiety and ADHD.”

Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing, PerfectTed

On one hand, “spreading positive energy” comes straight from the product truth. Matcha gives you a smoother, calmer lift — no crashes, no jitters, no anxiety spikes. And that taps directly into a much bigger cultural moment: rising anxiety levels and growing awareness of how coffee and energy drinks can make it worse. It’s a very real, very relatable tension — one that PerfectTed’s founder Marissa experienced first-hand.

On the other hand, “making matcha accessible” reflects their mission to open up a category that used to feel niche and intimidating. PerfectTed lowers the barriers, simpler rituals, lower price points, easier formats, so matcha becomes something anyone can pick up, use and actually enjoy.

“These guys have never invested in performance…They just love brand. They’re focused on creating a really disruptive, very distinctive brand with great brand assets and activating it in a crazy way.”

Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing, PerfectTed

They bring this brand to life across every touchpoint of the business. They’ve made matcha more accessible through the formats they’ve created, the merchandising, and the product design. Cans for convenience. RTDs. Instant pistachio latte powders designed so you don’t need a whisk, a bowl, or a ritual. And soon, single-serve sachets clipped onto supermarket shelves so the barrier to trial drops to zero.

And then there’s how they bring positive energy to life. Through their tone, their activations, their events, and their culture. PerfectTed doesn’t do slow-breathing, soft-lighting, “wellness” energy. Their energy is high-tempo, vibrant, punchy, joyful. “The feeling we want people to experience is more like an ice plunge than a meditation session,” Kelly said. You see it in the music-led events, the dynamic content, the humour, the bold packaging, the way employees stand rather than sit at Taste of London. It’s not wellness… it’s positive energy.

And everything they do is wrapped in their bold, green & distinctive brand colours. From packaging and supermarket promotions to the merch employees wear.

Little bigness: owning a small world first

Perhaps one of the smartest things PerfectTed has done is what Kelly calls ‘Little bigness’. Simply rather than trying to be everything, everywhere, all at once, they went narrow and deep.

“For me, it’s about creating a sense of big brand ‘bigness’ in a little community…You become their brand. It creates identity, word of mouth, and a really strong network effect.”

Kelly Shaw, Head of Marketing, PerfectTed

When it came to Little Bigness, they had a clear focus. For around eight months, that focus was almost obsessive. “We focused on 18–35-year-old women in London,” she said. “Now our brand awareness in London among that audience is around 85% …on par with brands like Trip and Dash, actually about 10% higher.”

Personally, I love this approach. It’s super smart. As a challenger brand, you simply cannot spend enough to get mass reach and compete with mainstream brands. That’s why this model works so well. You still prioritise reach…but you do it in a far more focused, efficient way. You win one core group, then the next, then the next. It’s effectively a step ladder, where you incrementally build mass reach over time.

And the ambition doesn’t stop here. The big challenge now, however, is to ratch up even further and help PerfectTed go even more mainstream. They have brilliant disruption and physical availability… the challenge now is how do they get their mental availability to catch up.

New models of fame

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know I tend to bang on about one thing: fame is the single biggest driver of brand growth. What I love about PerfectTed is that they aren’t following the old playbook of fame ( big budgets, top-down TV spots, and media plans only a holding company could afford). They’re inventing a completely new model. A new kind of fame engine.

They’re building something far more modern and far more scalable for a challenger brand: a human-powered fame machine. As Kelly told me, “We talk about H2H… human to human. Ultimately, people build emotional connections with other people, not with brands.” And that philosophy defines every part of how PerfectTed shows up in culture. Instead of polishing corporate stories, they put real humans, founders, staff, even the office dog, at the centre. Their employee-generated content engine on LinkedIn is one of the strongest in the UK food-and-drink space, with up to 30 employees posting every day.

It’s also a system designed for joy, not obligation. The team runs a weekly “LinkedIn of the Week” ceremony, complete with confetti cannons, giant novelty cheques, and a founders’ handshake for the winner. It turns content creation into a cultural ritual. Keeping energy high, morale up, and the brand constantly in the feed. They’ve even built comedy alter-egos to cut through LinkedIn’s self-serious tone: the company dog now has her own profile as Head of Morale, for example.

But PerfectTed’s fame engine isn’t just employee-led, it’s being institutionalised. Kelly is building an in-house content studio that operates more like a meme newsroom than a traditional marketing department. Graphic designers, videographers, editors, storytellers, PR operators and virality specialists are all part of the mix. The ambition is simple but bold: create 10x the content output of most brands without relying on paid influencers or big ATL campaigns. As Kelly put it, “I don’t need a big budget, I need a big team…one that is focused on earned-first attention and is creatively driven.”

I love this approach because it mirrors exactly what we’ve have recently built at Defiant. A model where we match big-agency with BAFTA-winning comedy writers, influencers, meme-makers and creators to give brands outsized fame and market share.

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Four principles challenger brands can learn from PerfectTed

To wrap up, here are the big takeaways I’d pull out of Kelly’s playbook:

1. Out-create, don’t outspend
PerfectTed knows it will never outspend Red Bull or the big FMCGs. So it’s built a culture around out-creating them instead. From “London Matcha Festival” stunts to LinkedIn dogs and novelty cheques, the internal mantra is clear: do something creative enough that it earns attention.

2. Invest in content before you think you need it
Most brands leave content until later. PerfectTed treated it as foundational. That’s why Kelly’s first hires weren’t just managers – they were creators. “The brands that are really winning today are telling a story about how they’re building the business,” she said. “If you don’t have content from the beginning, you lose a lot of the most interesting parts of that story.”

3. Practice “little bigness”
Rather than chasing everyone, everywhere, they went deep with a very specific audience: 18–35-year-old women in London. Becoming ubiquitous inside a small, high-value community gave them the momentum – and the confidence – to scale wider.

4. Build on brand, not performance
Perhaps the boldest move of all: they’ve never relied on performance marketing to grow. Everything is anchored in brand – from product (formats, price points, flavours) to distinctive assets, to founder-led storytelling and employee content. In a world where many early-stage brands become addicted to ROAS dashboards, PerfectTed is a reminder that conviction in brand can still build serious commercial muscle.