STORYTIME

Hey, hi, hello! I'm Caitlin, the founder and maker of Kinship Milk Tea. I fell in love with milk tea while working in Suphanburi, Thailand in 2013. I was teaching English (shout out to my beautiful, lovely students at Sa-Nguan Ying High School), and every day I would grab a milk tea from the 711 or the local boba shop. I loved discovering new flavors and tea types as I traveled around Southeast Asia. When I moved back to Austin, I really missed having milk tea in my daily routine - it's the best. I realized I had two options - drive to a boba tea shop or make it myself every time I wanted one. 

I’m more of a doer, so I turned my tiny home kitchen into a test kitchen and got moving. Many months of trial and error and lots of spilled milk later, I landed on something that I felt proud of and wanted to share. Whenever friends or family would come over, I'd make them milk tea and force them to try all of my latest concoctions. Lots of excellent feedback later, the train picked up speed more and more as I served milk tea to friends and family, and those folks shared it with their circles. This was never supposed to be a business, but here we are! I launched this company officially in late fall of 2019, right before the pandemic hit. That ended up being a pretty rough time to start a small business, but we are back at it! It brings me so much joy to serve milk tea to the Austin community and to ride the roller coaster of the small business club.

 

  Female founded + operated. Made in Austin, TX