"Small Steps. Big Difference."With Nicola Elliott, Founder and Creative Director of Neom Organics 

CEW were delighted to welcome Nicola Elliott to the CEW Mentoring Breakfast on Wednesday 22nd August. Nicola is the Founder and Creative Director of Neom Organics, a natural wellness brand that launched in 2005. Nicola started the mentoring breakfast by saying that despite her nerves speaking to the room, it’s great to be able to tell her story without the time constraints of an Instagram video in today’s technologically-orientated world.
Nicola began her story by stating that although she was present to share her expertise on the beauty industry, the rules that stand for Neom Organics will not apply to other cosmetic brands. However, the one factor that universally binds all successful brands is passion.
Nicola continued to introduce her story regarding her developing thirst for wellness, discussing her background working as a beauty editor for glossy magazines, which consisted of 60 hour weeks, 2 am phone-calls and consequently, total exhaustion. This ignited Nicola’s desire at the age of 27 to invest more into herself; she noted that in 2018, wellness is considered a luxury: hence the inspiration for her ‘Real Luxury’ range which has proven to have significant calming effects on the body.
Always a beauty consumer, Nicola began to blend essential oils in her bathroom, not realising the complexity of combining them, she was shocked at how difficult achieving the perfect scent was. But with some practice and the support of her family behind her, Nicola persevered and created her now incredibly successful ‘Tranquillity’ oil, used throughout a significant amount of the Neom range. Seeing her family members suffer from health issues such as insomnia and low energy, Nicola was inspired to continue experimenting and creating blends tailored to help combat these wellbeing conditions. From her experience, she noted that most adults would either be suffering from one of three things: poor sleep, poor mood or poor energy levels and these inspired her collections that are so well recognised today.
Elliott began to source the purest possible essential oils, using her knowledge from her studies in Aromatherapy to inspire the calibre of luxury she wanted in her own brand. The purpose behind Neom Organics is to create a wellbeing toolkit that can be tailored to the individual using natural ingredients. The reasons behind the use of natural ingredients in Neom Organics are:
1. Using synthetic ingredients can have unknown effects on the body.
2. Nicola supports the belief that the power of natural ingredients are far superior to any synthetic counterpart.
Nicola told the audience, “look to source the ingredients that work for you to find products that you like, instead of looking for what you don’t want”, evidently feeding this into her own brand.
Four candles stemmed Neom Organics’ original range, and since then, the brand now has over 13 different product ranges that marry luxury with organics beautifully. Neom is now stocked at over 400 independent retailers that help tell their story and the brand look forward to their hugely anticipated partnership with John Lewis this Christmas.
Nicola concluded her inspirational story by familiarising the room with the importance of passion in a business – expressing that passion is the single thing that will take a brand from liked, to loved. “Creating Neom was like climbing up Mount Everest in my flip flops, but my passion for it is the only thing that drove me forward”.
Nicola finished with the final words, “you will get a lot wrong in business, but if you get passion right, you have a good chance of getting your brand right”.