Moby, Remixed

Sitting across a table from the man known as Moby, you wonder if perhaps your eyes are playing tricks on you. Wearing glasses, he's referring to his chief operating officer, discussing the finer points of corporate brand extension, and carrying on about irresponsible young rock stars(!) between sips of loose-leaf tea (you know, the kind your grandma drinks). How can a man with such a sublimely round orb of a head, you wonder, sound so...square?

"I was looking at this article called 'Stars and Their Cars," he's saying softly, his voice tinged with disbelief. "It was 20 musicians and their various fancy cars. And if you look at the shelf life of most musicians' careers, there are two or three years where they're profitable. Suppose a musician sells two million records. They're like, 'Wow, I must be rich.' But what they're not thinking of is, there are four other people in the band, there's a manager, lawyers, music video costs, promotion costs, touring costs, and taxes. And I wanted to call up each musician and just say, 'Haven't you done your research? Look at the numbers!"

Meet Moby the CEO, the fiscally conservative alter ego of the politically liberal, multiple-platinum-selling pop star who packs concert halls, scoops up MTV awards, and has been virtually anointed the coolest mainstream act in America. It's this Moby that forged an extraordinary relationship with the business world a few years ago when companies around the globe -- from Nordstrom to American Express to Nissan -- fell over one another to license all 18 songs from his 1999 album, Play, for use in commercials, films, and television shows. In the end, it's estimated that the songs were licensed a staggering 800 times. And a rock-star businessman was born.

Moby the man was actually born 39 years ago as Richard Melville Hall, great-great-grandnephew of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. His parents nicknamed him Moby early on and it stuck. In his 20s he became one of the top club DJs and dance-music artists in New York City, spinning electronica in a way that would eventually cross over to mainstream pop audiences with Play.

And now with lessons in branding, licensing, and publicity under his belt, he's venturing into the business world again. His own label? A recording studio, perhaps? A high-end fashion label? Nope. Try a tea cafe. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan. That's right. Tea.

On the surface, it hardly seems ambitious. The place is small. Ten tables or so. It's cute. And there are 97 different kinds of tea on the menu (because drinks have much higher margins than food, Moby points out). The food is strictly vegetarian, and it also caters to a vegan crowd since Moby happens to be one himself. And it's very popular, with an overflow crowd that even sent Moby himself to another cafe down the street on a recent rainy day.

He started the cafe, called Teany (pronounced "teeny"), in the summer of 2002 with his ex-girlfriend Kelly Tisdale, who remains his business partner. Unbeknownst to them both, they had each harbored a desire to open a tea cafe for many years, and discovered each other's secret dream soon after September 11, 2001. Downtown residents both, they were shell-shocked from that day (which happens to be Moby's birthday) and thought such a cafe might bring comfort to those in their neighborhood. And they thought there was a niche to be filled; they felt as if all the teahouses in New York City had either an English or an Asian twist to them. "You just don't really have any plain old American teahouses," says Tisdale. "We don't treat it like some sacred ceremony, and we don't charge $9 for a tiny pot that you're supposed to chant over before you drink. It's very unintimidating."

But she soon realized they'd made their first mistake. They opened the cafe with 93 steaming hot teas on the menu at the beginning of a steaming hot summer in the city. "It was really stupid of us," says Tisdale, who opened the cafe while Moby was on tour. "We didn't even think of iced drinks."

Tisdale quickly whipped up a few iced tea flavors for parched customers, but it wasn't until Moby returned from tour a few months later that the seeds of a larger idea were planted. Moby had remembered trying a tea juice drink at a Los Angeles restaurant and began mixing some of Teany's teas with juices and spices. "No one's going to want that," Tisdale told Moby at the time. But she humored him. And Moby turned out, perhaps not surprisingly, to be a mix master, fusing flavors like pomegranate juice and white tea as if they were backbeats and blues samples. After dozens of duds, they came up with a handful of flavors they liked. More importantly, the flavors proved to be big hits with customers. And Moby began to see a bigger picture emerging.

He sensed that the bottled tea drinks on the market were either too sweet (Snapple) or too purist (Honest Tea); there was nothing that was slightly sweet, healthy, and fun. Before long, the cafe wasn't just a cafe anymore. "The restaurant exists as a restaurant but also as a brand-development laboratory," Moby says. He and Tisdale tried out creations like the Antioxidant cooler and the Vanilla Berry Hibiscus cooler on customers while hatching plans for an ambitious bottled tea line, as well as future projects like bagged teas, loose leaf teas, and even a cookbook (due out in April). "If you just open a restaurant, it's going to be frustrating," he says, citing the low margins on food. "But if you see it as a way of developing the brand and developing product as well, I think it makes it more viable, more interesting, more exciting, and with less pressure on the restaurant."

Even when developing the name and logo, Moby looked for something that could lend itself to other products. He wanted a unique name and a simple, clean logo that would stand out regardless of the product. "If you're going to start a business," he says, "don't box yourself in as far as your development potential."

"One of my goals is to start businesses that make things that can't be downloaded. And basically, you can't download a bottle of tea."

And for the musician in him, there was a huge upside to the food and beverage segment. "With what's happening to the music business and film business with downloading," he says, "one of my goals is to start businesses that make things that can't be downloaded. And basically, you can't download a bottle of tea -- at least not yet."

And so in June of this year, Moby, along with consultant Barney Stacher, who also helped launch the cultish Dirty Girl brand of soaps, introduced Teany Bottled Tea in the New York metropolitan area. It's already in 200 stores, and has just expanded to Paris, where it's now carried in the department store Galleries Lafayette. There are discussions with Whole Foods, which carries Teany tea in its Manhattan stores, to carry the product nationally. One especially effective strategy was mixing the teas with alcohol -- birthing the Teany Bellini and the MarTeany, to name two -- at trendy New York parties, opening up whole new marketing channels.