Kiley grew up home-schooled alongside her two sisters, guided by a mother who believed in practical skill, natural remedies, and letting children find their own rhythm. Remedies lived in the home: tinctures, teas, a cabinet of what worked. Just as formative, she says with a laugh, was boredom: the long, unstructured afternoons where curiosity had room to breathe.

“She’d let us be bored,” Kiley said. “We were so bored sometimes, but that’s when we got the most creative. That’s when we figured out what to do with ourselves.”

In those stretches she learned to experiment—peppermint with citrus, black tea with vanilla—hosting tea parties as a teenager not to sell anything, but to see what a flavor could say if you listened closely. Creation itself was the point, and that ethos—making as a way of being—never left.

After college (business, with concentrations in marketing and entrepreneurship), Kiley spent nearly a decade in restaurants, moving from the floor to a self-fashioned role bridging marketing, social media, and operations. She learned the living mechanics of a small enterprise—budgets, events, payroll, even a cookbook launch for the chef. The pace sharpened her skills but also frayed her edges; she wanted a gentler cadence, the kind of work that could grow without grinding her down.

Back home, she returned to what felt natural: syrups for mocktails and lemonades; teas mixed for friends at gatherings. People nudged her to sell, and she shrugged: “It was just a hobby. I didn’t have business intentions. It was just fun.”

Still, in 2019, with encouragement from friends and her husband, she put up a small website, packaged a few blends, and took them to pop-up markets. The response was immediate. People recognized the hand behind the craft—the taste of something tended, not manufactured. The scale stayed modest, on purpose. Small wasn’t a phase; small was a stance.

Talking to Kylie Duncan felt like encountering a voice I’d been straining to hear, only to find it had been speaking all along, just softly, steadily, from the center. As she spoke of creating for the sake of creation—an approach which runs counter to the dominant corporate frameworks that define success by external benchmarks—I found myself quietly overwhelmed. Not because the ideas were new, but because they were so intimately familiar. It was like hearing my own philosophy echoed back with a clarity and conviction that comes only from living it out loud.

At one point she said, “I hope you agree with me—most people don’t.” And I did, completely. Her decision to follow her inner compass rather than chase visibility or expansion felt both wise and necessary. She doesn’t strive to draw people in. She doesn’t need to. By staying rooted in her own rhythm and voice, she naturally attracts those who resonate.

I know this, because I felt that pull myself.

There’s something magnetic about someone who knows that “more” doesn’t live out there, but in here—in the work, in the stillness, in the act of making something true.

Then came the pandemic. Markets shut down, restaurants closed, and the world moved indoors. For many small businesses, that moment was a reckoning. For Kiley, it was the moment Tea & Toast came fully into being.

She began putting together what she called the Quaran-Tea Kit—a self-care box with medicinal tea blends, honey sticks, and a printed positivity guide. It was a simple idea meant to help people reconnect with comfort and ritual. “I just thought people needed something uplifting,” she said. “Something small and human.”

She posted it on Instagram. By the next morning, it was sold out.

That single box became the proof of concept for everything that followed. The message was clear: people wanted something real—something that slowed them down.

“It was good timing at a hard time,” she reflected. “People were looking for something grounding, and it just met that moment.”

Making it official brought a new discipline. Tea & Toast became an LLC. Kiley leased time in a shared-use commercial kitchen, learned inspections and labeling law, and refined production: “It was a lot of steps, but I wanted to do it right.”

Loose-leaf blends were joined by tea elixirs—concentrated mixers for cocktails, mocktails, or sparkling water—and bottled tea lattes made with plant-based milk. She sourced herbs, fruit, and flowers from nearby farms, keeping the work close to the ground. Local wasn’t a slogan; it was a way to keep the work honest.

By late 2020, Tea & Toast had a rhythm: wholesale accounts, weekly markets, special events, and—at peak—five employees. Orders came fast; the calendar filled. Then a quiet question surfaced: What am I building here? The answer wasn’t a scale-up plan; it was a pruning. Staff slimmed. Wholesale deepened. A tea subscription launched to create a steady cadence without the churn of constant travel. The shape of Tea & Toast became coherent rather than performative.

Outdoor service still mattered—farmers markets, weddings, festivals—but hauling a fragile setup through wind and rain was unsustainable. The solution arrived as a gift: a 1975 double-axle camper trailer. With her father, Kiley renovated it into a traveling tea bar—fully enclosed, weatherproof, with a place for everything. “It was a huge project,” she said. “We’d work on it after markets, late into the evenings… But now it’s so much easier. Everything has its place.” Now they roll in, open the hatch, and serve tea elixirs, lattes, and mocktails by the cup. “It’s practical,” she said simply. “It just works.”

Partnerships unfold as organically as the recipes. Wholesale accounts—like Ardmore Coffee, owned by her sister and brother-in-law—become canvases for custom drinks: a gingerbread cookie latte; an apple-pie herbal steamer; later, an iced vanilla London fog with raspberry cold foam. Some were meant to be seasonal; people kept asking, so they stayed.

Kiley’s guiding posture is responsiveness: create for real people in real places; follow resonance rather than trends. Together with a local event collaborator, Shellie from My Garden Blooms, she also teaches hands-on sessions—tea blending, herbal infusions, tinctures—where technique naturally opens into conversation. People arrive for recipes and leave talking about pace, balance, and the texture of daily life.

These collaborations also show up on Shellie’s side of the fence: cross-business events that pair flower bars with Tea & Toast drinks, plus medicinal tea education and blending workshops—a community frame that keeps things local, tactile, and real.

She’s also continuing to refine the subscription model—tightening seasonal offerings and creating clearer on-ramps for people who discover Tea & Toast at the traveling bar and want something steady at home. The camper makes event service more resilient; the subscription keeps the heartbeat regular between events. Together, they form a rhythm Kiley can sustain without sacrificing the quality that drew people in to begin with.

Even the Tea & Toast logo—designed by her sister—spells out the philosophy. It’s a flowering tea plant. In commercial tea production the shrubs are trimmed constantly and rarely allowed to bloom; letting it flower anyway is a quiet statement about growth on your own terms: welcome it, but never at the cost of forgetting what you are.

Reading back through Kiley’s story, I recognize a theme beneath the details: a maker whose business is the outgrowth of a life, not the other way around. Tea & Toast shows how longevity can come from restraint—that thriving sometimes means pruning rather than planting, focus rather than constant expansion.

In my own inner dialogue, I’ve been using the phrase a Living Field to describe this kind of enterprise: not a stage built to collect attention, but a field tuned to frequency.

People recognize the signal and lean in.