Many Filipinos look forward to a brief pause during their workday for the merienda — a midday snack-and-sip ritual similar to British high tea. Miggy and Victoria Reyes, a brother-and-sister team who grew up in the Philippines, aim to share that tradition through their fast-growing tea brand Narra, named for their country’s national tree.
Narra, founded in 2022 and formally launched in July 2023, sells tea lattes made with oat milk with bold flavors such as roasted oolong and strawberry matcha in shelf-stable cans decorated with a woven motif referencing indigenous Filipino weave traditions. It sells the beverages through its website and Amazon, more than 200 World Market stores and a variety of smaller retailers in California and on the East Coast—the beverages retail from $3.99 to $5.99.
Miggy, a Stanford University graduate, taps a background that combines a career as a fine-dining chef trained under Michelin-star culinary luminaries in San Francisco and a stint at Tesla as a commodity manager, where he put his degree in engineering to work. Victoria worked in supply chain and demand planning at big companies such as Starbucks and The Honest Company.
Financing the company from their savings initially, they raised funding from friends, family and angel investors in a pre-seed round. Miggy created the brand’s core recipes. Although NARRA's drinks are caffeinated, they have about one-third to half the amount of a cup of coffee. The brand sources its teas from China and Japan.
As the company got closer to production, it hired a commercial formulator to make sure the brand was shelf-stable and FDA-compliant. NARRA bottles its beverages via an outsourced manufacturing partner, known as a co-packer, in the U.S.
All of their hard work is already paying off. With plans to increase their in-store distribution footprint five-fold, they expect to achieve a $1 million run rate by the end of 2024 or early 2025. The ultra-lean company has no paid employees yet, relying on a team of fractional sales teams, agencies and brand ambassadors.
myPocketCFO has helped them achieve visibility into their finances as they have grown, providing the information they need to make quick decisions, Miggy says. They can see and analyze expenses on a monthly and weekly basis, knowing at any given time how much they are spending on categories such as freight and marketing. It has also helped them maintain targeted margins in a fluctuating cost environment, where, for instance, they may have to book temperature-controlled trucks during the colder winter months. “Knowing your numbers is almost like a super-power,” Miggy says.
myPocketCFO has also been crucial in tracking the cost of goods sold, particularly when they have had to purchase ingredients in bulk but only used part of that inventory for each run, Miggy says. “Most of the time, owners are just looking at cash flow,” says Miggy. “If you dropped $5,000 or $10,000 on a raw materials order but only used $3,000 or $4,000 worth, then what’s your visibility on your cost of goods sold and margins? We knew we needed a team and solutions that could handle CPG more specifically — and that was Alice Zhang and her team at Pocket.”
With NARRA growing rapidly, Miggy and Victoria will introduce a fourth flavor later this year. “2025 will be NARRA’s breakout year,” says Miggy.
At MyPocketCFO, we're committed to helping small CPG brands assess their financial health more easily.
