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/ :WTS 7\ BSO B Continued from page 45 he picture in his office says it all. Devan Shah, owner of Los Angeles-based International Tea Importers, grew up in Southern India and spent boyhood summers exploring tea plantations in the country's famously fertile Nilgiri mountains. He started working as a tea broker while still in his teens, learning the ins and outs of flavor and business in general. In his 20s, he headed for the United States and almost single-handedly introduced the Americas to high-quality Indian leaf. INNOVATOR: Devan Shah (right), shown here in 1994, launched International Tea Importers in 1989. But the photograph he proudly brings up in conversation one afternoon is not one that depicts the green hills of his boyhood or the intricacies of the beverage he has spent decades investigating. No, the picture in question shows, of all people on the planet, actress Sarah Jessica Parker. She's holding a tin of tea from Chado, the high-end retail operation Shah bought in 1994. The pic was snapped during a TV interview Parker did in one of the Chado shops before she was a household name. "At that time, no one knew how big she was going to become," Shah says. "They wanted to have an up-and-coming star sitting with a backdrop of an up- and-coming beverage." As has been the case often in his career, Shah was in the per- fect place at the perfect time. Over the past decade, tea's health and taste profiles have grabbed the attention of Hollywood, and Shah's Chado was primed and ready to deliver to celebrities and their legions of followers. The small chain is set to open its fourth L.A.-area store this month, and the latest incarnation will be the business's most high profile to date, standing beside Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars take place each spring. As his Hollywood positioning shows, Shah's ability to sense opportunity is one that few others in specialty tea can match. When he first started in the States, he saw a gap in the quality-tea supplier market and quickly filled it. Later, he was a major player in the chai movement that brought better tea to huge numbers of Americans. In recent years, he has focused on capitalizing on spots "$ TEA ALMANAC 2012 COURTESY OF DEVAN SHAH