We spend a lot of time talking about disruption in business. Disrupting categories, challenging competitors, finding new ways to grow.
We spend less time on a quieter question. What if the thing most in need of disrupting is our own thinking?
That question ran through a talk we heard recently from Naomi Partridge, co-founder of Holos Kombucha.
She moved from a successful corporate career to building a purpose-led drinks brand, and the lessons she shared reach well beyond entrepreneurship.
Here’s what we took from it, and why we think it matters for the brands we work with.
Space to notice what needs to change.
After nearly ten years in a business that had given her exceptional training and development, Naomi sensed something was missing. On paper, it was a success. That, we think, is what makes it interesting, because it’s far easier to change when something is visibly going wrong.
She chose to step away and disrupt herself, which raised a question we’ve been turning over ever since. Are we leaving enough space to see what needs to change?
In a working world built around speed, efficiency and output, there’s rarely room to stop, listen and think about what comes next. Constant activity can feel like progress when it’s really just momentum, and sometimes the most useful thing a leader can do is question the direction they’re already travelling in.
A purpose that came before the product
That decision took her to Cambodia as a volunteer. There, she met a woman looking for an alternative to exploitation, and it showed her how much a job and a genuine opportunity can change. That encounter eventually helped inspire Holos Kombucha, a drinks business built around creating opportunities for people affected by exploitation.
We think purpose is easy to bolt on and hard to get right, so the order of events stood out to us. The purpose came first, from something she felt compelled to understand, and the business followed. That’s a very different starting point from asking what story a brand ought to tell.
Courage comes from doing
The idea we kept coming back to is simple. You can’t always think your way into change. Sometimes you have to act your way into it.
Naomi referred to the hero’s journey, the idea that meaningful growth means stepping into uncertainty. We tend to assume confidence has to arrive before action. Her experience pointed the other way. Courage came from doing the difficult thing, first by volunteering abroad and then by building a business without having every answer.
Starting small helped too. When the founders joined an impact incubator, they were encouraged to take an ambitious vision and shrink it to the smallest viable project. So instead of building everything at once, they took the product to markets, put it in front of real people and listened. Some of it was uncomfortable. The product didn’t always land, and the feedback wasn’t always kind. But the learning was worth far more than another few months of perfecting an idea nobody had tried.
We see the same pattern in marketing. Testing a campaign, trialling a new format or entering a new market rarely feels fully ready. A small experiment with real feedback will usually teach you more than a polished plan that’s never met an audience.
Comparison is the enemy of distinction
At one stage, a major potential customer gave the founders feedback on their product. To fit what the market seemed to expect, they created a more conventional version. Looking back, Naomi saw they had compromised what made the original proposition distinctive.
Later, a festive innovation came from a very different process. It was looser, more playful and less concerned with what everyone else was doing, and it went on to win Best New Drink Concept at the 2026 UK Soft Drinks Awards.
There’s a clear lesson in that. Brands can become so focused on competitors, trends and what customers might want that they lose the qualities that made them interesting in the first place. Understanding your market is important. Letting your market define your identity is something else. The challenge is staying commercially relevant without becoming indistinguishable.
For food, drink, travel and retail brands, where shelves and feeds are full of similar-looking options, that’s worth knowing. Copying what’s working for everyone else isn’t a strategy for building something people remember.
Remember to enjoy the view
The last thing we took from the talk was the simplest. Naomi reflected on how quickly one milestone turns into the next. A major retail listing, a successful launch or a business breakthrough can feel like the destination, and almost immediately attention moves to the next challenge.
For founders and business leaders, that creates a cycle where achievement is rarely fully appreciated. Growth matters, but so does recognising how far you’ve come. Building a successful business shouldn’t mean constantly moving the definition of success further away.
Start with a better question
Perhaps the biggest opportunity for businesses isn’t to move faster, do more or follow what’s working for everyone else. Perhaps it’s to create enough space to ask better questions, have the courage to act on the answers and build something that genuinely reflects what you believe in.
It’s a conversation we enjoy having with the brands we work with, too.