The Qi on Shark Tank (S17 E5)
I Applied to Shark Tank Three Times in Six Years. Here's What Happened When I Finally Got In.
The first time I applied to Shark Tank, The Qi was barely a year old.
I didn't get in. I applied again. I didn't get in. I applied a third time, six years after starting this company, six years of building something from a trip to Shangri-la, Yunnan with my mom that changed the way I understood plants and healing and what a brand could actually be for.
The third time, I got the email reply.
I want to tell you what that was like, honestly, not in the edited way some people may talk about these moments. Because the experience was stranger and more meaningful than I expected, and I think the reason it mattered has everything to do with why The Qi exists in the first place.
Six Years in the Making
I started The Qi in 2019, though the real beginning was 2018, a trip to Yunnan province with my mom that felt, in retrospect, like a before-and-after line in my life. I had spent more than a decade in fashion. I understood brand, I understood story, I understood aesthetics. What I didn't have was a product that felt like it mattered in the way I wanted things to matter. I loved fashion and after a decade in it I was also super burnt out. It felt so empty and meaningless to me towards the end of my career there.
Drinking flowers changed that. Whole flowers, specifically, the way they carry Qi, the life force that Chinese medicine has centered for thousands of years. The way they bloom back alive again in hot water. The way something that simple can shift the quality of a morning. Somehow help me reset my nervous system in 5 minutes.
I applied to Shark Tank the first time because I believed in what we were building and I wanted the platform to share my story. I applied the second time for the same reason, with more evidence behind me. By the third time, I had press in Vogue, Allure, Food & Wine, Forbes. I had customers who wrote to me about what our teas had done for their skin, their stress, their sleep. I had a real business.
And I still didn't know if they'd let me in.
When I got that email that we'd been selected for Season 17, I felt something I can only describe as surreal. I have been watching Shark Tank for 15 years. Never thought I'd be on it in my wildest dreams, I was still working in fashion in the early years. Six years of applications and iterations and pivots and countless sleepless nights, and suddenly I was going to walk into that room.
Walking Into the Tank
Nothing truly prepared me for it.
I know the show. I've watched other founders pace in the holding area, then step through those doors into the lights and the silence. I thought knowing what it looks like would help. It did and it didn't. Right before I went in, I was in the waiting room for what felt like an eternity with my heart beating so fast I thought it was going to bust out and fly away.
The room is bigger than it seems on television. I was quite FAR from the Sharks where I really had to PROJECT my voice. They are exactly as present as they appear, maybe more so. The cameras are everywhere. And I had about one minute to make the case for something I've spent years building, to people who will probe every number, every assumption, every decision I've ever made.
For about 30 mins (how long I was actually in the room for) I had to push away every old self doubt of "I'm not good enough", "my business is not big enough", "I'm not smart enough", with "I can do this" and "People deserve to know my products and their holistic healing properties".
I had practiced my pitch until I could say it in my sleep. I knew our numbers. I knew our story. And standing there, I still felt like I was slightly outside my own body, observing the whole scene from somewhere just above it, watching Lisa who used to work in fashion explaining whole-flower healing teas to a panel of sharks on national television.
At some point, I found my footing and thought all the sharks were so lovely and fun. They are just human beings like me! I mistakenly called Mr. Wonderful "Mr. Kevin" and they all laughed. The flowers helped too, they all loved them. Then everyone was out except for one. I really thought Lori and Allison (the Poppi founder) would have made me an offer, but nope.
Why Daymond John
Then there was just one offer. And it was from Daymond.
People ask me why him. The answer is more personal than most people expect.
Daymond John has had thyroid cancer, a struggle that went undiagnosed for years while doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong. He has lived through a serious illness and come out the other side with a deep, firsthand understanding of why health, real health, not the surface-level wellness industry version of it, matters. He has watched close family members and friends pass away far too young. He is genuinely invested in longevity and healing. Not as a trend. As something he has earned the right to care about.
When we talked, it wasn't just about the numbers. He understood what I was trying to do. He had his own version of the moment that changes the way you think about your body and what you put in it.
I joke about our unexpected connection "Daymond and I connected on a thyroid disease level" where I suffered my own condition when I was in my late 20s and didn't want to go with the western Dr's recommendation by cutting it out and be on hormone pills for the rest of my life. So I found a holistic way and healed myself through TCM (acupuncture and herbal remedies).
I left with a deal. But more than that, I left with a partner who gets it. And for that, I am forever grateful to Shark Tank for giving me the platform, and to Daymond for believing in me and my vision.
The Night It Aired
Season 17, Episode 5. November 5, 2025.
I watched our episode go live for the first time with about 20 friends in our tea studio in NYC, alongside millions of Americans tuning in across the country. I didn't know how I was going to come across on TV. It was such a strange feeling — nerves, surrender (what's done is already done), and excitement all at once. We sold out of multiple SKUs within hours. Our site traffic looked nothing like I had ever seen. Messages came in from people I had never met, telling me they had ordered and couldn't wait to try their first whole-flower bloom.
The episode re-aired in December. The response was extraordinary all over again.
But the moment I keep coming back to is smaller than any of that.
At our Union Square holiday popup, multiple women stopped at our booth and recognized me from the show. One couldn't believe it — she said, "I just saw you on TV last night!!" She shared her own health and healing journey with me. She bought some teas on the spot and was so excited to have them become part of her daily routine.
That happened more than once the whole holiday season. Different people, different stories, the same impulse — to share something personal with a stranger because the story and the products had touched something real.
I was so grateful I didn't give up after the second application.
The Shark Tank Bundle
After the episode aired, the most common question we got was simple: what do I start with?
We put together our Shark Tank Special Bundle specifically for this moment — the people who saw the episode and wanted the full introduction to what The Qi is and what whole-flower healing can feel like across a full day.
It includes our three most-loved whole flowers plus one box of our blooming tea — the products I talked about in the Tank, the ones that sold out the night we aired. Each one corresponds to a different part of the day, and together they form the daily ritual arc that is at the heart of how we think about flower tea and Qi.
Here's what's inside, and why — four teas, one for each part of your day.
Rose — 1st thing after waking, to open the heart and open the day
Before the meetings. Before the to-do list. Before any of it — this is the 15 minutes that sets the tone for everything that follows.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, rose (mei gui hua) works directly on the Liver channel, which governs how we handle stress and emotion. First thing in the morning, before food, is when Liver Qi stagnation — that tight, braced, emotionally armored feeling — is most ready to be released. Rose warms it loose. It opens the heart, moves stuck energy, and brings a quiet sense of ease that has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with being present before the world starts asking things of you.
Place one whole bloom in hot water. Watch it unfurl. Breathe it in. That's the practice. Fifteen minutes. You have them.
Blooming Tea — after breakfast, for grounded focus
Once you've eaten, this is where the blooming tea comes in — and the timing is intentional. Green tea on an empty stomach can be too sharp. After breakfast, something shifts: the caffeine releases slowly and evenly, without the spike, without the edge. Combined with L-theanine — the amino acid naturally present in green tea — it creates a state of calm, clear focus that carries you into the morning feeling steady rather than wired.
Our blooming tea is a hand-sewn bundle of green tea leaves wrapped around peony and amaranth flowers. Placed in hot water, it slowly opens into a full bloom before your eyes — a small, unhurried moment of beauty before the day accelerates. Peony supports emotional calm and circulation in TCM. Amaranth adds earthy depth. Together they make a tea that earns its place between intention and action.
This is not a weekend tea. This is for any morning you choose to be intentional — which, ideally, is every one.
Chrysanthemum — afternoon, to cool and clear
By mid-afternoon, most of us have accumulated what TCM calls liver heat — the agitation, eye strain, tension headaches, and mental fog that build when we've been under pressure, staring at screens, making decisions for hours on end. The afternoon slump is often misread as a caffeine problem. It is usually a heat problem.
Chrysanthemum (ju hua) clears it. Gently, without sedating, without the crash that follows another coffee. Our whole chrysanthemum blooms are hand-picked, with a clean floral bitterness that opens into something almost sweet. Brewed in the afternoon, it is the reset the second half of your day actually needs.
Blue Lotus — evening, to settle and release
Blue Lotus (lan he hua) is the quietest of our flowers, and in some ways the most profound. Used for centuries across Eastern and Egyptian healing traditions, it works on the Shen — the spirit, the emotional mind, the part of us that keeps replaying the day long after it's technically over.
Blue Lotus doesn't sedate. It settles. There is a subtle, grounding quality to it that is hard to describe until you've felt it — a gentle release from the noise of the day toward something quieter and more internal. Brewed in a glass so you can watch the petals open in the low light of evening, it is the ritual that makes the end of your day feel like a choice, not just a collapse.
Together, these four teas trace the arc of a full, intentional day. Not a supplement protocol. Not a wellness regimen. A practice — four small pauses that, taken together, change the quality of how you move through your hours.
That is what sold out the night we aired. That is what people at Union Square kept telling me had changed something small but real in their daily lives.
If you found us through the show, this is where to start.
If you've been with us for years, this is the set that tells the whole story.
