We're calling this series People That Wow, because behind every brand we've featured, there is a founder whose story deserves its own spotlight. Naomi Partridge and Megan Landreth-Smith are the first, and after two years of working alongside them, I can tell you their story is not really about kombucha at all.
Some journeys begin with a plan. This one began with a belief.
Naomi spent ten years at Cadbury, starting as a graduate and working her way through human resources. She loved the work and she was good at it, but something kept nagging at her. She wanted to do more, specifically for women who had experienced sexual exploitation, a cause she couldn't quite shake. Megan had reached a similar place from a different direction, having spent years in London supporting women through exactly that kind of trauma. Neither of them had met the other yet. Both of them, as women themselves, felt this cause in a way that was almost impossible to ignore.
That is what took them separately to Cambodia, and it is where they met. Naomi describes the connection as instant. Two women who had never crossed paths before found, within days of meeting each other on the streets of Phnom Penh, that they were trying to solve the exact same problem in the exact same way. One evening working there, they met a woman with five children who was being exploited nightly just to survive. She had a quiet passion for doing nails, so they bought her a starter kit and helped her find safe, paid work instead. A year later she was off the streets and her children were in school. It was small, and it changed everything for Naomi and Megan.
They built a business around a cause, not a cause around a business.
Naomi came home first. She resigned from her corporate job the day she returned to work after that trip, with no concrete plans but knowing she wanted to use her HR skills to create employment opportunities for survivors of trafficking and exploitation in the UK. She ended up designing workshops and eventually led the Sophie Hayes Foundation, which still runs those programmes today. Megan stayed out in Cambodia, and then the Philippines, doing similar work for another six months. When she finally came home and the two of them sat down for a drink, Megan told Naomi she had dreamed the name of their future business the night before. Holos. It means whole. Neither of them had a product yet. They didn't even know what they were going to sell. They just knew it had to create real, meaningful jobs, and it had to be something people would choose again and again, not purely out of compassion, but because they genuinely wanted it.