From the outside, Nami’s debut looked like an overnight success. Within 24 hours, the new matcha brand, founded by longtime YouTube creator Ashley Alexander, sold out during its July 2024 launch.
But nothing about its success was sudden.
Long before Nami existed as a company, matcha was a recurring character in Ashley’s content. Creating videos since her early teenage years, the now 26-year-old made matcha a familiar presence on her channel: reviewed, whisked, tasted, and revisited across recipes, ASMR, and trips abroad. It wasn’t a long-time marketing scheme: Ashley just really liked matcha.
So when she shifted from creator to Nami’s CEO, demand wasn’t speculative—it was already waiting.
By 2022, Ashley knew she wanted to take matcha from passion to entrepreneurial pursuit. She began conceptualizing what a matcha brand of her own might look like, started testing manufacturers and building her team, and even hinted on a podcast that a matcha product could be in her future.
“Coming from a background where I really understand my audience—what engages them, and also knowing what I like to see from other brands as a consumer—had a huge impact on the success of Nami,” Ashley says. “Of course, I already had an audience to begin with, but the goal was always for Nami to become something larger than myself: a brand that has the ability to grow outside of my fan base, where people come across it and simply know it as a great, high quality matcha.”
But building a company didn’t mean stepping away from content; instead, Ashley brought her audience into the process by documenting trips to Japan to show how matcha moves from leaf to tea, and sharing the emotional reality of starting a company. “I realized that my audience loves to see all of the details behind the scenes,” she says. Her transparency became Nami’s foundation.
It also became leverage. To help shape the brand as it developed, Ashley moved tens of thousands of followers from social platforms into direct communication through email and text, forming The Matcha Mob, a highly engaged group that received early access, behind-the-scenes content, and a sense of shared ownership in how the brand was forming. By launch time in 2024, Ashley wasn’t testing a market. She was activating one.
Ashley partnered with Moby Ventures, a division of the Whalar Group, to build and scale Nami Matcha from day one. Together, they developed the brand strategy, product positioning, go-to-market plan, and operational foundation from the ground up. Niko Croskery, Moby Ventures’ President and COO at Nami Matcha, led the end-to-end build across Shopify and backend operations - implementing the systems, infrastructure, and processes required to launch, scale, and support significant order volume. “One of the things that Shopify allowed us to do was deal with scale from day one,” says Niko. “Usually when you launch a brand, you start small and then start to build. But we had a significant volume of attention and sales go through immediately. Having that kind of scalable infrastructure behind us to make sure that everything worked was really useful. It gave us confidence that nothing would go wrong on launch day—and all subsequent drop launch days.”
That confidence extended beyond online orders. In October 2024, Nami partnered with Shopify on its first New York pop-up. The event saw more than 1,300 fans show up craving matcha, with one drink served every minute for seven hours straight. All Nami merchandise, from matcha to apparel, sold out, generating more than $23,000 in product sales. “Building an online business is incredible: there’s something pretty special about seeing a Shopify dashboard light up when you launch a new drop or a limited-edition product,” Niko says. “But it’s really different seeing over a thousand people lined up around the block in New York, waiting four or five hours to get inside.”
In April 2025, Nami and Shopify brought the model to Los Angeles with a pop-up at The Lighthouse, where fans got to sample the latest Nami release: strawberry matcha. “Ashley cares very deeply about how her product comes across,” says Jacob McCourt, Shopify’s creator partnerships lead. “So much so that she mentored the baristas to make sure every drink came out just right. That’s the kind of person she is.”
Ashley returned to New York for a November 2025 pop-up, this time partnering with Shopify and Mai Pham, founder of Los Angeles–based apparel brand Alchemai, inviting fans into a nature-inspired sensory experience that merged serenity with streetwear. “Nami has had an amazing outpouring of support at our in-person events, and seeing how many people show up for our events has me flabbergasted every time,” says Ashley. “Shopify has been an amazing partner for my three largest pop-ups in NYC and LA. These in-person interactions have played a huge role in the success of Nami as well.”
"Since launching in 2024, Nami has reached customers in 139 countries and generated more than $6 million in revenue." The brand is expanding into cafés, while maintaining its direct-to-consumer-first (DTC) structure. Shopify remains the operating backbone, supporting scale across channels without fragmenting the business. “Shopify is the only real choice for brands like us,” Niko says. “Its ecosystem—together with all of the third-party apps we use for subscriptions, upsells, reviews, and everything else—makes it a really complete system for us.”
Nami is a case study in what happens when passion precedes product. Matcha was already part of Ashley’s daily life (and her audience’s) long before there was anything to buy. Nami simply formalized the relationship. The foundation is what made the early sellouts, packed pop-ups, and rapid expansion possible: familiarity built over time, paired with the operational muscle to support it right out of the gate. “Through Nami, I’ve been able to share my passion for matcha with thousands of people,” says Ashley. “I love knowing that, around the world, all of us are engaging in the same meaningful morning ritual of making a matcha. It warms my heart.”
