Lifestyle

A new leaf

When Gabrielle Green had the notion four years ago that high-end teas were a trend waiting to happen, she didn’t have a long track record of predicting market swings. She was only 15.

Still, she saw a niche.

“I saw that Starbucks was getting so popular with coffee, and thought, why couldn’t the same thing happen with tea?” she says.

Since then US tea sales have jumped, and Green has built the mail-order business Bodhi Teas, selling custom-blended teas from her home near Canarsie, Brooklyn. And last week she was honored as one of 25 “Global Young Entrepreneurs of the Year” by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), at a gala at the Marriott in Times Square.

During cocktail hour at the fete, Green offered samples and handed out business cards to a wine-sipping crowd, alongside the teen proprietors of Recyclets (bracelets made from soda cans), Big Tyme Cream Pies (from eighth-grade Baltimorean Steven Thomas, “your go-to guy for cream pies”) and pottery, landscaping, jewelry and animal-balloon businesses.

In addition to US winners, there was an international contingent, including Zhang Jim of China, who sells hand-painted shoes; Felix Beckmann, the German inventor of the Super Surprise Grill; and the Chilean high-schoolers behind Chocolates Piedra Azul — sweets made with native fruits.

They’ve all been schooled in the ways of business plans and profit projections by NFTE, a nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurship to students in low-income communities.

“You learn everything involved with starting a business,” says Green, a confident 19-year-old who enrolled in a summer program while in high school.

Now a freshman at George Washington University, she’s hoping to grow her start-up this summer, by selling to businesses including hotels and beauty salons. She eventually hopes to open a retail store, though for the moment, classes and summer internship decisions are diverting much of her attention.

Which offers a lesson in itself.

“I’m definitely learning about managing my time,” she says.