Hill Station Co. is a two-person, first-generation Indian American tea project, starting small on purpose. We're not a big buyer. We may only take a lot or two in the first year. But we'd like to be honest about what we're trying to build in the Indian hills, and the kind of partner we're trying to be.
Hill Station Co. is a US-based specialty tea project launching its opening catalog in 2026. We sell only what we can stand behind: single-origin white, green, and oolong teas from Kangra and Darjeeling. No chai. No CTC. No blends. No flavored teas.
We're a two-person operation at the start. The audience is the South Asian diaspora first, travelers and serious tea drinkers second. People who'd like a relationship with Indian tea beyond the industrial black export. The catalog is small on purpose, and so are we.
We'd rather start honest than pretend we have a supply chain we haven't built yet. In year one we're a curator, buying small lots from a handful of gardens. We become a direct partner only where both sides earn it.
The consumer side of the business lives at hillstation.co: story, teas, and the open-books breakdown on each tin.
The tea business has spent a century treating Indian gardens as commodity origin. We think that's been a loss: for drinkers, for growers, and for the places the leaf actually comes from. The point of Hill Station Co. is not to be another import brand. It's to help nudge, however slightly, how Indian tea travels out into the world.
Most of what a tin of specialty tea sells for never reaches the garden. We'd like to widen that share in a small, visible way: above-market prices agreed up-front, prompt payment in writing, and every cost published publicly so there's nowhere for margin to hide.
Kangra's tea economy was levelled by the 1905 earthquake and still hasn't fully recovered. Darjeeling has its own pressures: labor, climate, succession. We'd like to be a small, steady customer for the people doing the patient work of rebuilding it from the hillside up.
The diaspora mostly knows Indian tea through chai and commodity black. There's a deeper tradition: whites and greens that have been on the world's short lists since the 1880s. We'd like to carry those outward, named for the garden and the grower, not anonymized into another brand's story.
We don't pretend one small shop fixes any of this. But we believe a grower who works with us should be at least modestly better off for it, and that our customers should know, by name, where their money went.
We're launching with three teas. In year one we may only buy a small handful of lots (possibly only one) while we learn what our customers want. So this is less a shopping list than a description of what we're biased toward.
"Direct trade" means different things to different importers. Whether we buy one lot from you or ten, here's what we'll hold ourselves to, in plain terms.
We don't want to promise more than a first-year business can deliver. Here's the shape we'd hope to grow into. No guarantees, on either side.
We taste, we buy a small lot at a fair price through introductions or brokers, we see how it sells to our audience. Attribution is specific but not yet "direct." We don't claim a supply chain we haven't built.
If the lot worked for both sides, we'd like to come back next flush. Over time, the tin starts carrying your name, and we plan seasons together instead of lot-by-lot. We'd rather earn that kind of relationship than claim it.
Growing up in the US, India gets framed to Americans as a couple of things: samosas, traffic violations, and chai. But there's so much more to this country, and that's the story we want to tell. Hill Station Co. is a small tea project from the diaspora, for the diaspora, that treats the gardens in Kangra and Darjeeling as origins worth naming. We're not career tea merchants. We're two cousins learning as we go, starting small on purpose, and trying to be honest about what we don't yet know.
We're small. We may only buy a little tea in our first year (possibly only one lot) and we don't want to pretend we're bigger than we are. We're not posting this page to generate inbound inquiries. We're posting it so that anyone we do reach out to already knows how we think, what we'd commit to, and why we're doing this in the first place.
If a conversation makes sense, we'll be the ones getting in touch. But if you've read this far and want to send a note, we'd be grateful for it.
sourcing@hillstation.coIf English isn't the easiest working language, please write in the language you prefer. We'll translate from our side.