How LaDonna Olmstead’s Tea Madame Fills a South Sound Niche

This article originally appeared in the July-August 2026 edition of our sister publication, South Sound Business.

LaDonna Olmstead didn’t know much about tea when she agreed to take the reins at the Sumner-founded Tea Madame 20 years ago.

“I got a job (at Sumner’s Windmill Bistro) and the owner’s wife owned the tea shop, and I had gone into that tea shop a couple times and was like, ‘This is so beautiful.’ I loved it; it was something special,” Olmstead recounted. “She walked in one day and said, ‘I wish someone would come buy the tea shop’ — and I bought it from her. It was as easy as that.”

Olmstead, who has in the decades since expanded the business to Lakewood and Ruston, became responsible for the business’s sole employee, who provided her with some training. She immediately solidified the store’s somewhat loose hours into a strict seven-days-a-week, 9-to-5 schedule — “no exceptions,” she said. She also got to work properly educating herself about tea and its nuances.

“I can sell things that I know their history and everything about it, and it makes me excited to sell it, because I know those little things that make it special,” said Olmstead, whose background at that point had been in hospitality and corporate training rather than retail.

In her early days at Tea Madame’s original location — a squat 450-ish square feet and tucked away in a nursery — Olmstead said it was normal to sometimes go full days without a sale. She ascribed that to how, during the Northwest’s warmer months, customers weren’t thinking about hot drinks. So, she thought, “‘Hey, let’s try (the Puyallup Farmers Market). We’ll sell iced tea.’”

Supported by her quick-to-lend-a-helping-hand family members, Olmstead’s instincts proved canny. The company’s stand started selling $2 16-ounce iced teas with $1 refills, with three to six different flavors available every week. It regularly attracted lines of about 50 marketgoers, particularly during the summer months. That continued for more than a decade; Olmstead never changed her prices.

The popularity was sort of a double-edged sword, however. It brought Tea Madame, recognizable for its green-striped logo, unprecedented popularity, but the iced tea somewhat eclipsed the myriad tea concoctions available at the store to which Olmstead was ultimately trying to bring attention. Nonetheless, Tea Madame under Olmstead’s tutelage was profitable enough that it became feasible to open a second location in Lakewood in October 2015.

“I was selling more tea than I had a place to store it,” Olmstead said, “and tea has to be stored in a very specific manner.”

Olmstead’s entrepreneurial ingenuity was again tested in 2020, when lockdown, of course, forced all businesses to revise their models to comply with COVID-mandated measures. Tea Madame never fully closed. Olmstead met the moment with curbside pickups, to which customers seeking comfort in the form of tea flocked. She updated its online-ordering capacities, too, though she noted that that part of the business wouldn’t be perfected until its next level-up: its 2022 opening of a third branch at the Waterfront Market at Ruston.

“After COVID hit, the very first event (we did) was at the Victorian (Christmas Festival), and I happened to meet the former owner of the Waterfront Market at Ruston, and she was blown away by the booth and wanted us to have a store there,” Olmstead said. “We walked in the next day, and I thought, ‘I have opportunity here.’”

When asked what she thinks sets Tea Madame apart from other like-minded businesses, Olmstead pointed to its no-stone-unturned curation.

“I have many, many companies that I deal with, and if I’m looking for something, I don’t just go to the Costco tea company and buy theirs, because that’s what most people do,” she said. “I try to be the very best one I can find for my customers, that has a story behind it, that has the quality behind it and a good price.”

Describing herself as frugal in her own life, Olmstead is cognizant of cost and makes an effort to offer great deals on hard-to-find blends.

“I have teas that no one else has,” she said. Though Tea Madame’s expansion efforts have come at a rather steady clip over the years, Olmstead qualified that its growth has had more to do with fortuitous opportunities that she’s seized on than an active search to enlarge her business’s footprint: “I don’t look for things; they come to me.”

She’s not opposed to the idea of a fourth location, though. When it comes to expanding, she’s likely to be thinking more about Yacht Club Road, a new tea-based cocktail-mix offshoot of Tea Madame that’s tapping into her days tending bar.

“Other people are doing (cocktail mixes), (but) I have a better product, and I have the knowledge,” she said.

Twenty years after she came to Tea Madame by chance, Olmstead doesn’t feel like it’s fully been two decades. She has no plans of stopping. She’s “blown away” by her employees’ dedication; she loves her customers, many of whom have been buying from her since she took over.

“I have the most loyal, wonderful customers that follow me; I feel like that only happens when you’re good to them and you’ve taken them down the road the right way — in other words, you know, high-quality products, not compromising on anything like that, always having good information …,” she said, adding, “(In the beginning), I’ll be honest, my demographic was maybe a little older. It’s hard to see those people leave us, and it’s something you kind of have to, 20 years in, (know) that’s going to happen. But (I have customers that say), ‘Hey my grandma drank your tea. I still drink your tea.’”