Bloomberg Interviews Marlo's Matcha
Before we had any plans to launch Marlo's Matcha, we were busy having fun creating matcha TikTok content on our Freya & Jasmine in Tokyo account.
We were surprised to see how popular the content was, with our matcha playlist getting over 2 million views across 19 videos.
So when Bloomberg were doing an article on the global matcha shortage, we caught their eye.
When Bloomberg Emailed Us
The message appeared in our inbox like any other.
Except this one was from Mia Glass, a journalist at Bloomberg. She was working on a story about the matcha shortage and wanted to hear from someone actually living in Tokyo and who knew about the situation.
The plan started simple. A written interview. She sent questions via email about the matcha situation in Japan, where we recommend buying it, which cafes we love, and how the shortage has affected our content.
That interview became part of an article called "The Global Matcha Boom Is Driving a Shortage in Japan" published on February 27, 2025. Seeing our observations woven into a Bloomberg article felt surreal. But the story didn't end there.
The topic resonated with readers. Mia reached back out. This time, she wanted to do a podcast interview for "Big Take Asia: The World's Got a Matcha Shortage."
We hopped on the call. The conversation lasted about 30 minutes, though the final edit was much shorter. You can hear Freya's voice at the start of the podcast episode, which aired on March 18, 2025.
The whole experience felt a bit unreal. We were small creators making videos about our morning routines and favorite cafes. And suddenly we're being interviewed by one of the biggest media outlets in the world.
The Elderly Woman's Shop
One of the stories we shared during the podcast interview was about a shop in our neighborhood. Jiyugaoka isn't a tourist area. It's local, residential, the kind of place where you know the shopkeepers and they know you.
There's an elderly Japanese woman who runs a small matcha shop there. When we first found her, business was slow. She mentioned she'd never had foreigners visit before.
It made sense. Why would tourists travel to a quiet residential neighborhood when there are famous matcha districts elsewhere in Tokyo?
But after we mentioned her shop in our videos, everything changed. People started traveling specifically to buy from her. Her stock sold out constantly, so much so that she had to implement limits of one or two tins per group.
Funnily enough, (before we had 753 matcha) we started asking her to reserve matcha for us because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get any. That's how intense it became.
This one small shop in our neighborhood tells the whole story of the shortage of matcha. What was once a struggling local business is now a destination people plan their trips around.
From Creators to Founders
The Bloomberg interview happened while we were still just content creators documenting what we loved. We weren't thinking about launching a brand. We were making videos about our favorite cafes, sharing our morning matcha routines, and exploring Tokyo's tea culture.
But witnessing the shortage firsthand changed how we thought about matcha.
When we decided to launch Marlo's Matcha, sourcing became everything. We spent months searching for the right matcha and eventually landed on a matcha farm in Honyama in Shizuoka.
We wanted something we could stand behind, something that reflected what we'd learned living in Tokyo and creating all that content. Quality matters. Origin matters. And in a world where good matcha is increasingly hard to find, those things matter even more.
The Bloomberg interview reminded us why we started making content in the first place. Not for views or validation, but to share what we genuinely love. That's still the mission. We're just doing it differently now.
With Marlo's Matcha, we're not just talking about matcha anymore. We're sharing it. Being part of this global conversation, from TikTok videos to Bloomberg podcasts to launching our own brand, feels like the story coming full circle.
The best things are shared, whether that's a video, a story, or a tin of really good matcha.
