VAHDAM India (Experience Store)

The family timeline is published on the brand's own site. Nathmull Sarda moved from Rajasthan to Darjeeling and opened a local store in 1931 to sell teas from the surrounding estates; his son Nandlall took over; Madhav Sarda moved to Delhi in 1980 and opened a tea store called Kho-Cha opposite the Delhi Golf Club. In 2015 Bala Sarda, the fourth generation, started VAHDAM at twenty-three — the name is his father's reversed — and in 2023 the brand opened this Experience Store in Khan Market, its first.

The model is simple and it shows on the shelf: buy from the Indian gardens, pack at origin, skip the middlemen. Single-estate lots sit beside everyday tins, most of them priced by the 100 g — a Darjeeling first flush at ₹ 800, an Assam Gold Summer at ₹ 1,200, a Himalayan green at ₹ 315 and a High Mountain oolong at ₹ 550, those last two both grown on Himalayan plantations. Then the small formats: a 50 g Imperial Himalayan white at ₹ 899 and a 30 g ceremonial matcha at ₹ 1,199, with an Earl Grey that goes up to a 500 g bag.

Khan Market is the only counter, so everything else the company does happens around it: herbal infusions, gifting, accessories, and online orders that ship free inside India above ₹ 599 and reach more than a hundred countries. The brand runs a social initiative it calls TEACH ME, pledging one percent of revenue to the education of farmers' children, and it publishes an annual impact report. For a shop this small, the catalogue behind it is unusually wide.