Tea has a way of softening time. And in the hands of Rocky Xu, founder of Rocky’s Matcha, it has become something even more intimate: a daily ritual, a quiet act of care, a bridge between tradition and contemporary life.

Rocky’s journey into matcha began unexpectedly during the pandemic—when a visit to a shaman prompted him to quit coffee and reexamine the pace of his life. What started as a personal morning practice eventually evolved into something larger: a way to share stillness and the ceremony of tea with others, while still honoring its cultural origins with deep respect and care.

Since launching in 2022, Rocky’s Matcha has grown from a flea market pop-up into a thoughtful, design-forward brand appearing at Paris Fashion Week with Louis Vuitton, Art Basel Miami, Felix Art Fair in LA, and in collaborations with Saie, Byredo, sacai, Stone Island, and Ghetto Gastro. Rocky is known not just for his tea— but for his sincerity—his ability to build relationships, community, and create space for reflection in a world that often rushes past it. At the heart of it is the matcha, yes—but more than that, it’s a philosophy: move slowly, stay grounded, and lead with intention.

It’s not driven by hyper-growth, aggressive marketing, or the constant churn of product drops. Instead, Rocky’s Matcha is guided by something slower, more intuitive. For him, matcha isn’t just a product to be sold; it’s a medium for connection, reflection, and ritual. The approach feels almost subversive in a culture obsessed with scale and speed. Rather than chasing trends or optimizing for virality, Rocky prioritizes intentionality with collaborations that “make sense,” events that feel more like quality time, and a deep understanding of the cultural depth of tea.

In LA, Rocky extends that spirit of intimacy through a monthly series called Breakfast at The Western—a quiet gathering of friends, creatives, and collaborators hosted at the Kiko Kostadinov flagship. With complimentary matcha and pastries, these mornings offer a soft entry into the day, a space to reconnect and reflect. Like everything Rocky does, the breakfasts are a subtle but meaningful gesture: a reminder that good things take time, and that some of the most powerful connections begin with something as simple as tea, shared slowly.

So… I heard you saw a shaman?

This is not a made-up story. I made a donation to go see him, and I feel like if you’re going to spend the money, or the time, or the energy, you may as well follow through on it and see what happens. This was 2020, and I had no idea that this is where I would be now, five years later, with a matcha brand that is doing fairly well. I texted Greg, the shaman, and said thank you because I hadn’t really had too much discourse with him following the energy work that we did. It was just a nice time to check in with him, and just be like, ‘You kind of set me on my path.’ I feel like I still have impostor syndrome. But I think, if anything, it’s just really cool to see this thousand-plus-year-old sort of tradition get this new life with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, a younger audience. And the younger audience themselves are really kind of going about it in a certain way, wanting to learn about where it comes from, how it’s made, and where the health benefits are.

Do you consider yourself to be a very spiritual person?

Yes and no. I didn’t grow up religious by any means, but I definitely feel like I believe in a higher being. I try and practice meditation, and not to tie it back to matcha, but me waking up every morning and making a matcha, that’s kind of how I know my day is getting started. That, to me, is just a practice. I try and meditate and do the things that will help me ground myself. I guess you could say it’s tied to spirituality, then, sure.

What started your journey to create Rocky’s Matcha?

We started by essentially white labeling and working with people who had already imported it, and from there, we took it a step further. The barriers of entry are low, and we were able to kind of take advantage of it. Because, going back to your question of how I got started, I worked in a corporate setting for the first 15 years of my professional career. I think it got to a point where coming out of the pandemic, a lot of my friends that I still talk to, to this day asked me about what’s going on in my life. A handful of them had told me, ‘Why don’t you start your own thing?’ and it’s always been, ‘Why don’t you start an agency? You’re super tapped in. You’re connected, people, generally speaking, all like you, and you get along with a lot of people. Why don’t you start an agency and just kind of, connect the dots?’ And I didn’t really like that, not because I didn’t think it was possible, but because I felt like I was happy to do that anyway.

Then, my friend, Paulo, who knew that I was making matcha and doing matcha related things, he was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be doing a flea market, and I want people who come to the flea market to feel like they’re walking into my home, and my mom’s gonna have her empanadas there, it’s called Carmen’s Empanadas.’ He’s like, ‘I’m gonna have the No Free Coffee guys there, I don’t have a tea option. Why don’t you come and set up and do your matcha there?’ and now here we are. I give Paulo a lot of credit, and then the other friend that I was going to mention is my friend John, who has Ghetto Gastro. He’s just a savant, and he’s worldly. He’s super connected, an incredible thinker. He really put the battery in my back to be like, ‘No, you gotta go do this.’ One of my first trips to Japan after the pandemic, once they opened back up, John happened to be in Japan at the same time. He came with me to visit the producer that we still work with to this day. I would say, definitely the two of them. I have an amazing network of friends now that, still continuously, every day, they’re always cheering me on. You can’t be an entrepreneur without a community, so I think that really helps as well.

I was just going to ask about the importance of community, but it seems like it started with a community 

It started with Paulo and John, and then even now, like Melanie from Ghia, it’s non alcoholic spreads, she’s such a mentor. I kind of joke with her, but I’m like, ‘You’re my spirit animal today.

That’s funny, because you mentioned these people, and I think we’ve actually interviewed all, if not most of them, before and have echoed the same sentiment. 

Yeah, more than likely, because they’re all super successful, and they’re doing incredibly well. And so there’s Melanie, and there’s Kirsty Godso, she’s like a sister to me. She’s amazing, she’s a Nike master trainer. She trains everybody, like, on the planet that’s beautiful, essentially, and then she has her own stuff. But going back to the community bit, there are all these people that are constantly in communication, and everybody’s cheering each other on, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.

Even like Al here, with Morán Morán, you see the Otto 958, and Rocky’s Matcha, that’s not by accident. It’s because we’ve had this dialogue, and this friendship, and this kinship for a long time, and want to support each other, and we want to do things that we feel are authentic and organic to who we are. Hopefully you’ll see that even next week when we do the breakfast, like that’s going to be the first one that we do. It’s just another way of inviting people into our space and celebrating what it is that we do. For me, it’s matcha, for Al and Otto it’s apparel and design, and all that. It’s pretty exciting.

That’s beautiful. You have a very influential group chat going.

There are a few of them, yeah.

The connection between matcha–or even coffee–and fashion or design isn’t immediately obvious, but you’ve made it feel seamless. What does that intersection mean to you?

For me, we’re not doing anything that doesn’t feel organic or authentic to us. My business partner Max and I—who created the brand identity for Rocky’s Matcha and lead all things creative—always joke that we operate on intuition. A lot of what we do isn’t overly strategic; we just follow what feels right. Because of that, we get a lot of inbound interest from people who want to collaborate with us. It’s like, ‘Who do we think makes sense for us to work with?’ and that’s always what we rift back and forth on. We’re both into fashion, design, art, that’s why we collaborated with Otto 958, that’s why we do pop-ups at Felix Art Fair and Art Basel Miami, or Paris Fashion Week. It’s just kind of been a natural extension, because these are things that we’re already interested in and would want to be at anyway. So it’s like, why not bring what we’re working on to those places? I feel like we’ve gotten incredibly lucky where we’ve kind of just been at the right place at the right time, because café culture, and food, and specifically coffee shops and what we’re doing, it’s such a nice compliment to fashion right now.

And it’s funny that you bring up coffee culture. Coffee, I feel like now is such a capitalistic symbol. For example, “Oh, let’s go and have a meeting over coffee.” It’s always transactional, but when you think of getting tea with someone, it seems more so for pleasure; it seems very intimate.

I never thought about it like that. I think there is something very pure and honest about tea. And when we were doing the research for the project that we did with Otto and Rocky’s Matcha, I wanted to make sure I got it right, but there were four principles of the original kind of tea practice that we fell in love with. But, these are things that I still feel, whether we like to admit it or not, we still kind of practice. So we incorporated this into the collaboration with Otto, but it’s “Harmony with other people in one’s environment, respect for other people, even if we disagree, purity of heart and in environment, and tranquility of mind and spirit, a return to our natural state.”

So these are the four principles of Chanoyu that practitioners of tea want to integrate into their daily lives. And that isn’t lost for me: harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. Even though I had to dig this up to make sure that I got it right, it’s something that I feel is naturally occurring. And to your point, it feels like there’s a synchronicity about it. It doesn’t feel as transactional as maybe saying, “Let’s go get a coffee,” I guess, I don’t know, maybe a few years from now, people will be over the coffee thing, and “Let’s get a matcha,” will be the new “Let’s get a coffee,” but we’ll see.

I really like that sentiment. Maybe it’s just me, but I do hate seeing things pop up that are… watering down something cultural? Especially as we talked about before, tea is so rooted in tradition, and it isn’t insincere here.

At the end of the day, most businesses are there to make money, and I’m not going to say that we’re not here to make money, but I’ve always said to my team: “We don’t ever want our customers to feel like we’re constantly selling to them.” I just want to share our love of tea, and specifically matcha, with our audience. And the other thing is, I feel as if we were barely scratching the surface in terms of what’s out there. Obviously, you have to do what’s right for your consumer, but matcha latte is as far as I want to push it for right now. And we’ll do matcha ice creams and certain things, but I kind of want to honor the tradition, because this is how it was intended. And I just want to make sure that whatever it is that we’re doing, we’re not gentrifying or bastardizing it. And again, the people that we work with, they’ve been doing this in their families for so many years that I think it deserves the sort of respect that it gets. There are even certain producers that I know were maybe turned off to our brand at first, but then when they realized that we want to preserve the craft and the tradition, they were like, ‘Okay, hold on, maybe there’s something there.’

You have so much passion and heart. And now, this is a question that I ask everyone: how do you keep your heart open?

How do I keep my heart open?  I don’t know, you just do. I was taught at an early age: don’t judge a book by its cover, and to give everybody a chance. You should always want to hear somebody else’s story, because you don’t know what that person, thing, project, or story is behind it. And sometimes when you look into it, you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, hold on a second.’ That’s why I even love doing studio visits, because you see the painting, but then you don’t know how the artist got there. And then when you go into the studio visit, you hear the process behind the practice. Process and context, it’s so important. Especially with art. I can think something is beautiful, but not know what it means. I think context is super important, and I just think we owe it to ourselves. There are six billion plus people on this planet. We’re lucky enough to work in the fields and the spaces that we do, and I think we have a passion for our professional careers, and that sort of overlaps with our personal interests. When you have that, you just owe it to yourself to hear what else is out there, because not everybody has it or is as fortunate as us in Los Angeles, right? Maybe I’m sounding too altruistic, but that’s my outlook on things. And, again, I’m guilty of maybe not doing a good enough job of giving everybody or everything more of an open outlook.

Photographed by Angella Choe

Styled by Bin X Nguyen

Written by Bree Castillo

Grooming: Archangela Chelsea

Location: Morán Morán Gallery