Press

Uchi is an Amsterdam-based, design-led matcha brand built around a single question: where does the desire for beautiful objects meet the need for calm? The answer, founder June Stutterheim believed, was already centuries old. Matcha is the ritual where the two have always met.

The answer is a refillable system. The Base, an airtight stainless steel canister designed to be kept for life, and the Pod, a refill of ceremonial grade single-origin matcha, sourced from the Okunoyama garden of Horii Shichimeien in Uji, Japan. Together they replace the disposable tin with an object made to stay on the counter, not in the cupboard.

Alongside the system, Uchi designs the tools of the ritual: a ceramic chawan, a matcha scoop, a fine-mesh sifter and a bamboo chasen. Every piece is made to be used daily and kept permanently.

Uchi is self-funded, independently owned and fully female-led, run by a deliberately small team from Amsterdam. The brand stands on three commitments: ritual, considered design and closed-loop sustainability.

There are more matcha brands than ever. Uchi exists because almost none of them are object companies.

The category competes on powder: grade claims, wellness promises, a tin that gets thrown away. Uchi inverts this. The permanent object comes first, and the matcha arrives as its refill. The Base is designed to be bought once and kept for life; the Pod closes the loop around it. No other matcha brand is built on this architecture.

The second difference is restraint. One garden, one grade, one system. Where the category adds flavours, formats and claims, Uchi removes them. The brand invites rather than convinces, closer in spirit to Aesop or Rimowa than to the wellness aisle.

June Stutterheim is 24 and has already spent a decade in food: a custom cake business started as a teenager, her own cake shop, professional kitchens and a catering company. Her connection to matcha began at age twelve and never left.

She founded Uchi knowing exactly how crowded the matcha market had become. That was the point. She had read the moment clearly: a generation more visually literate than any before it, a growing need for calm and ritual as a counterweight to speed, and matcha arriving as the cultural bridge between the two. Every brand in the category was selling the trend. None had connected these three currents into a single designed object. Uchi is that connection: not another matcha brand, but a permanent object with matcha at its centre.

She built the company in Amsterdam with a deliberately small, fully female team, entirely self-funded, and runs it hands-on today, from product design to sourcing. The brand's design language, from the stainless steel Base to the identity itself, is hers.

June is available for interviews, commentary on the matcha category, and features on young founders, female founders and independent luxury brands.

Uchi's matcha comes from Horii Shichimeien, a tea house in Uji founded in 1879 that cultivates the Okunoyama garden, the last surviving of the seven historic tea gardens of Uji designated during the Muromachi period. The garden has been under cultivation for some six centuries and is recognised as part of Japan's official tea heritage.

Uchi works with a single origin by design. One garden, one grade, traceable to its source. The brand approaches this heritage as a guest, not an owner: the craft belongs to Uji, and Uchi's role is to carry it into daily life elsewhere with accuracy and respect.

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