YouTubers Eamon & Bec want to make mental health conversations a daily Habit

Can your morning cup of Earl Grey help you have a better relationship with your friends and family? Eamon and Bec (a.k.a. Eamon Fitzgerald and Rebecca Moroney) are trying to answer that question with a resounding yes.

The Canadian creators, who reach 1.2 million subscribers on their joint YouTube channel, are the co-founders of a new beverage brand called Habit. Eamon and Bec are tea lovers themselves, but their take on the drink offers more than just fine ingredients and eco-friendly packaging. By including conversation prompts with each order, Habit encourages drinkers to share the feelings they’ve kept locked inside themselves.

Habit is the second tea company Eamon and Bec have founded together. About a decade ago, they worked together on Chaiwala Chai. As they lived together in a sprinter van, their priorities shifted. The #vanlilfe movement picked up steam, and Eamon and Bec became two of the top vloggers in that world.

But recently, the lives of these two intrepid adventures encountered a few twists. Six years after they began living out of a van, Eamon and Bec decided to take a break from that lifestyle earlier in 2023. Their next upload, titled “Not The Video We Wanted To Make,” referenced Moroney’s breast cancer diagnosis, which she received in 2021. After returning to Canada, she was forced to endure a relapse scare, but she received happier news months later when she learned that she is pregnant with her first child.

The difficulty of that emotional journey provided Moroney with a new perspective. “I think cancer was a beautiful gift for me in that it helped us slow it made us slow down and it made us recognize the real burnout that we had been experiencing,” she told Tubefilter. “We so deeply wanted to be successful on YouTube, you know?”

A friend’s suicide also prompted Eamon and Bec to consider the value of day-to-day conversations. “What I regret in our friend’s passing is in those moments where I could have asked maybe a deeper question, and I felt I didn’t have that prompt or reason to,” Moroney said. “You know, Eamon and I for a long time used to sign off our videos with, go call someone you love and tell them you love them.”

In hopes of bringing those “small check-ins” to tea drinkers around the world, Eamon and Bec launched Habit. The couple confirmed to Tubefilter that they’ve received over 2,000 orders for the tea company each time they’ve mentioned it on their channel.

@banff_photography Not your regular tea #habittea #eamonandbec #poses #branding ♬ original sound – Banff Photography

Each of Habit’s conversation cards includes two prompts: One with a more superficial question (i.e. what’s your favorite vacation you’ve ever taken?) and one that asks for deeper reflection. Habit drinkers can also purchase a full pack of prompts, which comes with 50 to 100 conversation cards.

“The prompts we all kind of came up with, Eamon and I sat with them and had the best conversation we’ve had in probably 10 years of our relationship,” M0roney told Tubefilter. “We sat down as business owners being like, do we like this one? Do we like that one? And all of a sudden we’re like three hours deep into these questions and conversation. And I’m like, that’s it. Like this is magic.”

Acting as co-business owners is a tall task for two creators, but Eamon and Bec know how to bootstrap. As they relaunch their tea company, they are relying on the skills they’ve developed during their years on the road. The mental strength they were forced to develop when their van broke down in Mexico has informed their work in the business world.

That doesn’t mean Eamon and Bec are taking on Habit by themselves. Their business manager is their acting CEO, and they work with another couple on sourcing and logistics.

And then there’s the fans. “It’s such an advantage to have that built-in audience, to be able to, you know, lean on them for, for sales and for, for reviews and feedback,” Fitzgerald told Tubefilter. “What do you think of this flavor? Thumbs up, thumbs down.” Thanks to their following, Eamon and Bec have been able to establish Habit as a direct-to-consumer business.

“We genuinely want to be in people’s cupboards, daily drinkers, inspire conversation, and we don’t care if it looks cool if we’re in Walmart,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s not the play.”

Habit is a humble D2C business for now, but that doesn’t mean it lacks room for expansion. Eamon and Bec are hoping to eventually establish a warehouse in Europe so that they can sell to European tea drinkers without incurring steep tariffs. There’s also the possibility of expanding to other drinks, though Fitzgerald quipped that “we’re going to leave coffee to Emma” for now.

When you look at Habit beyond the mental health mission at its core, it’s a simple proposition: Good, high-quality tea with carefully-sourced ingredients. When I told Eamon and Bec that I was drinking Trader Joe’s Earl Grey during our call, Fitzgerald reached for a shelf behind him. “This is the boom boom. This is Earl Grey right here,” he said. “Have a sniff. Have a laugh.”