some people spend their days designing websites. some make packaging. some build decks, apps, or logos that quietly disappear into other people’s routines. samantha spends hers designing for a company that makes massage guns.
which is a very good sentence to say out loud
because it sounds slightly ridiculous until you remember that recovery, wellness, and every version of feeling less wrecked after life or exercise is now a whole world of products, habits, and devoted users.
samantha is a senior designer at therabody, and by her own account it is the most exciting job she has had so far. that feels believable. there is something inherently fun about working on a product people immediately recognize, especially one that lives somewhere between serious industrial design and the very modern hope that a device can fix the fact that your shoulders have become concrete.
before therabody, her work moved through furniture and wine. which is already a pretty good little design timeline: furniture, wine, recovery. chairs, bottles, massage guns. a career path with range.
now it is recovery, wellness, and, presumably, a lot more theraguns than she ever expected to have in her visual orbit. the kind of role where one massage gun becomes several, the aesthetic system grows around it, and suddenly your daily work involves shaping how a whole category looks, feels, and speaks.
lately, though, another part of her routine has been changing too.
for a while, she was drinking way too much coffee.
not in the cute one-cup-and-a-croissant way. more in the accumulated, slightly self-aware way people say it when they know the habit has gone a little too far. she wanted the energy, just with a little less caffeine. something that could still do the job without making the whole day feel like it was moving too fast for the body attached to it.
that is usually where the matcha for coffee lovers story starts. not with hating coffee. with realizing the coffee routine may have gotten louder than you wanted it to.
so she tried matcha.
it did not go well.
she did not like it.
at all.
in her words, it tasted like grass.
an honest review. possibly the most common first impression matcha has ever received. and also, unfortunately for matcha, not an entirely fake one when the first version you try is not particularly doing it any favors.
the useful part of samantha’s story is that she did not stop there. she kept trying it anyway. not because she instantly understood it. not because she was trying to become a different person. just because she wanted something that could replace at least some of the coffee and she was willing to give the green thing another chance.
that is maybe the most realistic way to become a matcha person. not love at first sip. more like repeated exposure, mild skepticism, and a slow shift from absolutely not to wait, actually, maybe.
and eventually, somehow, she acquired the taste.
the grass note stopped feeling like a dealbreaker. the drink made more sense. what had first felt strange started feeling familiar, and then, even more annoyingly for her earlier self, good.
if the “grass” thing is still the part stopping you, what does matcha taste like is probably the more useful answer than pretending everyone loves it immediately.
now she drinks it a couple times a week and actually prefers the steadier energy.
that detail matters, because this is where a lot of coffee-to-matcha stories quietly land. not in some giant identity makeover. just in the realization that the energy feels different. a little more even. less spike, less crash, less feeling like your nervous system got dressed before the rest of you did.
it also makes sense for someone whose days are already built around design decisions. matcha is one of those things people often arrive at through refinement. you try, reject, revisit, adjust, then realize your taste changed while you were busy making other plans. one day the thing that felt wrong starts feeling right simply because you gave it time.
so now the coffee tower has, at least partially, been replaced by matcha. not entirely. not in a purist way. just enough to count. enough for it to become part of the week. enough for it to be the calmer option when she still wants energy but does not want the whole volume of the day turned up.
character development, genuinely.
there is something especially nice about how ordinary the transformation is. no wellness sermon. no dramatic before-and-after. just a designer with an interesting job, a history in furniture and wine, a coffee habit that got a little out of hand, and a drink she used to hate but somehow now likes.
that is what makes Matcha People work in the first place. not because everyone has some profound origin story. but because matcha keeps showing up in the middle of actual lives, specific ones, messy ones, work-filled ones, the kind where taste changes slowly and routines change even slower.
for samantha, it fits somewhere between product mockups, design reviews, too many past coffees, and the current reality of being a senior designer in a recovery-and-wellness universe she seems pretty happy to be in.
and because poda matcha paste is built for people who want matcha without turning it into a production, it fits that kind of routine pretty well. squeeze, stir, sip. keep designing. move on.
this is samantha.
matcha people.
→ try poda matcha paste
— mujtaba, founder