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Meet the siblings who have grown UK’s best-selling probiotics brand into £24m firm
Soraya Janmohamed still feels “warm and nostalgic” when she imagines walking back through the doors and the perfume smells which pervaded her father’s chain of local community chemists.
She has good reason to. It was where she, along with her sister Jalal and brother Farah, learned the pharmacy ropes before the co-founding trio went global with their family-owned company Optibac Probiotics, the UK’s best-selling brand in its field.
After the siblings finished university and garnered external business experience, they have since learned on the job at Optibac, growing the firm to projected turnover of more than £24m.
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The Hampshire-based firm, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has around 100 employees, with the business made up of 82% women and gender equality on its board.
“We’ve had amazing people come in and teach us things,” says Soraya. “An HR consultant came a decade ago, who suggested we pay six-month maternity leave. We felt that was what we should do. We don’t wave about the term feminism but we do consider ourselves quite a feminist business.”
Employee benefits also include £500 worth of free probiotics annually, an increase in holiday days and reduced hours, as well as a week’s extra pay at Christmas.
The latter dates back to their father Feroze’s business outlook. “He taught us things right from the get go,” says Soraya. “He wasn’t a big marketer but for the first five years all our focus was on sales. That was what was going to bring in the revenue.”
She says the best advice handed down by their father, who is retired but sits quietly on the Optibac board, was “to hire people smarter than you”. He was also a community staple. “People all knew dad and from all walks of life,” she adds.
Having started with his much-loved Coopers Chemist on Andover high street, he grew 12 local pharmacies in the South East over 35 years, with his offspring acting as fledgling sales reps.
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“We used to get on the phones to independent pharmacies and we were so focused that people would know that, if they wanted to sell us something like utilities or advertising space, they would have to call us after 5pm,” recalls Soraya.
“From 9 to 5, our shops were open and we were calling our customers.”
Focus shifted when their father’s pharmacist friend in New Zealand first told the siblings about probiotics, after recommending them to customers alongside antibiotic prescriptions.
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