I was just trying to stay focused long enough to build my future.

Growing up half Syrian, half Romanian, I was always somewhere in between — between cultures, between worlds, between who I was and who I wanted to become.

The first time I drank yerba maté, I was 12 years old. I was in Marmarita, Syria — a small mountain town where the air smells like eucalyptus and diesel, where men play backgammon for hours and time moves like honey. My uncle Hassan took me to one of his friends’ houses. They handed me a small glass gourd filled with warm yerba. I don’t remember how it tasted. But I remember how still the room was. How focused everyone seemed. Like the world had been turned down to a low hum.

Years later, I found myself hunched over my laptop at 3AM, chasing the kind of success that doesn’t give you weekends. Dropshipping, pivoting, failing, learning. Building and rebuilding my life from scratch. And beside me — always — a thermos of yerba maté. Not the powdered kind. The real herbs. Because coffee never did it for me. Too sharp. Too shaky. Yerba was different. It made me feel like I could breathe through the chaos. Like I could focus without fighting myself. Like I had roots under all that ambition.

I didn’t create YZN because I thought the market needed another wellness powder. I created it because I couldn’t find a version of yerba that felt like me.

Everything on the shelf felt like it was made for someone else — the matcha moms, the biohacker bros, the supplement junkies chasing shortcuts.

YZN is for the ones building something real.

It’s for people with a thousand tabs open and a dream they can’t shake.

It’s for the ones who know that energy shouldn’t come with anxiety, and focus shouldn’t come at the cost of your gut, your peace, or your soul.

So yeah, YZN isn’t just a drink. It’s the ritual that built the brand.

It’s what I sipped every day to make sense of the mess.

And now — it’s yours.

— Yazan

Founder, YZN