Moby, Remixed

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Dane Neller, CEO and president of Dean & Deluca, a high-end specialty food retailer that's primarily in the Northeast, says the bottled tea line has been received "incredibly well." He attributes the success to the product's quality and to the eye-catching label that Moby created. He also says it's a savvy move on Moby's part not to push his involvement with it. "You want to sell the product, not the hype," he says. His only concern is that the company may try to grow too quickly.

It's a concern Moby shares. He says he's not inclined to sell the brand off to a large company like Coke or Pepsi, or even to partner with big-money investors who would expect fast results. "It seems like doing it ourselves, and financing it myself, we can keep it very small," he says. "And I don't know, this might be the dumbest thing in the world, but I just thought in launching, in developing the brand, I want to understand it before it expands. I want to be able to walk into almost every store that sells Teany and make sure it's being positioned well and also see how people respond to it. You want to start small because it seems like, ironically, starting small hopefully gives you the best chance of survival because then your mistakes are small mistakes."

And launching in the summer wasn't the only one. The first nine months, the cafe lost money hand over fist. "We had a really complicated menu at first," says Tisdale, who had worked in several restaurants before but never as a manager. They were using expensive ingredients, some of which spoiled very quickly. "We were basically paying people a dollar to eat our sandwiches. I had a cook who was very smart, and she told me, 'You're never going to make money like this. You don't need me here five days a week, you only need me here two. Simplify your menu and you'll be fine."

"Most people's best day would be on the beach at St. Bart's or driving a motorcycle above St. Tropez. Me, it was being at the bottling plant."

They broke even in year two. And Moby, who was barely visible in the opening months, now treats it as a second home. He lives six blocks away and eats there every day, sometimes twice a day. But there are no signs -- except for his frequent presence -- that he is affiliated with the cafe. They don't play his music, and there are no pictures of him (in part because Moby, while popular, is a polarizing artist, especially given his strong anti-Bush viewpoint). Many of the patrons don't recognize him, though some occasionally approach him for an autograph, and he happily indulges them. He is, however, very aware of his customers.

Tisdale says Moby is flat-out obsessed with customer service. "He'll be in the middle of a lunch meeting with four people," she says. "But if our staff doesn't greet customers who walk in within the first five seconds, Moby is up, running to get them menus and greeting them. I'd bet if someone walked in here and said, 'I really, really, really want to eat for free,' and if Moby was standing there he'd probably say to me, 'Well, it's just this once. Think of the markup on these things, you can just do one, can't you?' I'm almost sure of it." He regularly jumps up and clears his own table if a customer walks in and there are no tables available. He shovels snow from the front sidewalk. He adjusts the awnings so the glare of the sun doesn't hit diners in their eyes. "I don't think he expected that he was going to like Teany so much," says Tisdale. "But he adores it. He's so proud of it."

Moby says that one of his favorite days this year was the day the Teany bottles started rolling off the assembly line. "Most people's best day would be on the beach at St. Bart's or driving a motorcycle above St. Tropez," says Moby. "Me, it was being in Union, N.J., at the bottling plant. You feel like a queen bee giving birth to a few hundred thousand babies. You see the bottles come off and you're like, 'Wow, it exists now.' And I guess that's what's most exciting about starting this or making music -- creating something that didn't exist beforehand."

But despite the huge time commitment to his new album, coming out in March, he says he finds his mind drifting back to Teany, perhaps more than it should. "It's fun, but it gets very stressful," he says. "I find myself losing sleep because there's a health food store on University Place that isn't carrying Teany. I need to learn to take a step back."

Still, his plans for the company are anything but teeny. He'd love to franchise, a la Starbucks (which happens to be named for the character Starbuck in Moby Dick, a favorite book of Starbucks' founders). "I have this theory," Moby says, "and I'll probably end up being wrong, but I really think that in the next 25 years, tea will not replace coffee, but green tea consumption is going to go through the roof. Green tea is, pound for pound, one of the healthiest foodstuffs on the planet. And it's a good vehicle for delivering caffeine, tastes nice, and has an incredible diversity of flavors." He says he doesn't know enough about franchising yet, but he does know it's a real estate game, and that profit margins on franchising aren't particularly meaty.

Meanwhile, Moby's next start-ups are Little Idiot Collective (Little Idiot is the name of a character he draws compulsively), a maker of apparel and merchandise, and Blab Co., a group of illustrators -- including himself -- that he's helping organize in the hopes of licensing their work not only for publications and companies but also for Little Idiot's products. "For some reason, I have this almost pathological need to throw myself into things that I know nothing about," he says. "It's so exciting. A year ago, I knew nothing about the bottled beverage business."

But his COO, David Ronick, who oversees all the entities under the umbrella of Moby Entertainment, says Moby's a quick study and actually has some natural advantages. "In the traditional sense of marketing you think about who's our customer, what are their needs and wants, and how do we create a product or service that meets those needs and wants in a way that we can scale off of," he says. "But Moby kind of flips those things on their head, in that he looks at things as 'What would my friends want? What should people want that maybe they don't know about yet?' I think he needs to be ahead of the curve."

That, of course, is Moby's specialty.

This is Elyssa Lee's and Rob Turner's first story for Inc.

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