Nav Customer Stories: Sipping Streams
Following several customer stories focused on growing businesses, we wanted to create a film that showed what long-term success could look like. Sipping Streams gave us an opportunity to create something more aspirational—showing an established entrepreneur who had built an unlikely idea into a national brand.
This campaign followed Jenny Tse, founder of Sipping Streams Tea Company in Fairbanks, Alaska. Drawing from her Chinese heritage and a lifelong connection to tea, Jenny built an award-winning business in one of the least obvious places to do it. What immediately drew us to her story was the ingenuity behind the company itself: growing tea in Alaska using greenhouses heated by natural hot springs, then turning that operation into a nationally distributed brand with products available at Target.
As Creative Director and Producer, I led the creative vision for the project, shaping the story, overseeing production, and guiding the content strategy from concept through launch. We approached Jenny’s story as something more aspirational than a traditional customer testimonial. Rather than focusing solely on the challenges of entrepreneurship, we wanted to show what can happen when a founder combines a strong point of view with resourcefulness, persistence, and the financial foundation to keep growing.
The film anchored a broader content campaign that included paid social creative, organic social content, podcast integrations, and supporting marketing assets. Building the campaign around a single story allowed us to extend its reach across channels while creating a consistent experience wherever customers encountered the brand.
The final piece became more than a customer success story. It was a portrait of an entrepreneur who built something extraordinary in an unlikely place. By focusing on where Jenny had already arrived—not just where she started—we created a story that encouraged business owners to think bigger about what they could build themselves.
Creative Direction Teresa Wozniak
Producer Teresa Wozniak, Catherine Giese
Story Nathan Frontiero
Director Alex Mertens
Motion Graphics Alex Mertens
Photography Alex Mertens, Teresa Wozniak
Video Alex Mertens, Teresa Wozniak, Amylou Sarion
Editor Alex Mertens