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From $0 to $600K per month Selling Tea at 22 Years Old | Gretta Van Riel

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She built a $600,000-a-month tea business off $24 and a hashtag.

In August 2018, Foundr published an extensive interview with Australian entrepreneur Gretta Rose van Riel titled “From $0 to $600K per month Selling Tea at 22 Years Old,” walking through how she turned a Melbourne apartment side project into a multimillion-dollar e-commerce brand. Van Riel founded SkinnyMe Tea in May 2012 at age 22, launching it with just $24 in her bank account while still working full-time at a marketing agency. What followed was a crash course in early Instagram commerce, built on a made-up word — “teatox” — and a willingness to keep selling after her first day produced exactly four orders.

• Van Riel started SkinnyMe Tea in May 2012 with $24 and no outside funding, while holding down a full-time marketing job.
• She coined the “teatox” concept — a two-step detox tea program — and grew the business to $600,000 in monthly revenue within six months using influencer partnerships and manufactured scarcity.
• SkinnyMe Tea went on to win Shopify’s 3rd Build-a-Business Competition and scaled into a $20 million company that sold more than 11 million cups of tea.

From Four Sales to a Six-Figure Month

The launch was not the overnight sensation it’s often remembered as. Van Riel’s first day selling SkinnyMe Tea online produced four sales — hardly the foundation of a company that would later clear $600,000 a month. Rather than pivot away from the idea, she leaned into the one channel that cost her nothing: Instagram, which at the time was still a young platform with almost no established playbook for commercial use.

She began recruiting influencers and running niche cross-promotions with other small accounts, tactics that read as standard now but were largely improvised in 2012 and 2013. Van Riel also built in artificial scarcity around her “teatox” packages, a technique that pushed hesitant browsers into buying before stock supposedly ran out. Within six months of bootstrapped operation — no investors, no outside capital — the company was generating $600,000 in monthly sales.

The Teatox Playbook

The branding choice mattered as much as the marketing channel. By packaging her herbal blends as a “teatox” — a two-step detox tea program rather than just another wellness tea — van Riel gave the product a name and a narrative that influencers could talk about and customers could commit to as a routine, not a one-off purchase. That framing, paired with the scarcity tactics and the influencer network she’d built from scratch, became the engine behind SkinnyMe Tea’s growth curve.

Four sales on launch day. $600,000 a month within six months. No outside capital in between.

The results eventually caught Shopify’s attention. SkinnyMe Tea won the platform’s 3rd Build-a-Business Competition, a credential that further validated van Riel’s approach at a moment when “influencer marketing” wasn’t yet an industry term. The company ultimately grew into a $20 million business and sold more than 11 million cups of tea, all traced back to that $24 starting point and a full-time job she was still working when the first orders came in.

The Aftermath of SkinnyMe Tea

Van Riel didn’t stop at tea. She later applied the same community-to-brand formula to other direct-to-consumer ventures, including The 5th Watches and Drop Bottle, treating each new company as a test of whether the playbook could be repeated outside the wellness category. Foundr’s interview framed her story less as a one-time viral hit and more as a repeatable method — one she eventually packaged into a course with Foundr called “Start & Scale Your Online Store,” aimed at teaching other founders the same influencer-driven, scarcity-based approach that took SkinnyMe Tea from $24 to eight figures.

The interview sits alongside a run of other founder case studies InfoSearched has covered, including the Scentbird CEO’s journey to building a multimillion dollar company and a separate dropshipping founder’s climb from $400 to $1.3 million, both of which lean on the same low-capital, social-first growth model van Riel pioneered with SkinnyMe Tea back in 2012.