For investors
For founders
We build
Romanian businesses.
Capital that arrives
with an operator attached.
The Wordsworth Holding Company was founded in Bucharest in 2022 by James Simmons, after twenty-five years working in consumer businesses across Europe and Latin America. We take positions in branded Romanian consumer businesses and stay close enough to help them grow.
We back Romanian consumer businesses with a small cheque and a lot of time. James Simmons spent his career building consumer brands at PepsiCo and Unilever, and has since worked alongside founders to build some of Romania’s most successful emerging businesses.
- Founded
- 2022
- Based
- Bucharest
- Holdings
- 4
- Brands
- 7
- Board seats
- 2
- Combined revenue
- ~€20m
We answer our own email. A paragraph about your business is enough to start.
Talk to usWordsworth
Holding
CompanyGet in touch
Looking at the same markets?
We are always curious about investment opportunities — distinctive brands with growth potential, from hospitality to wellness. Perhaps we can compare notes. Drop us a line — we answer our own email.
Talk to us
The asset is not the cheque. We sit beside founders, building together some of Romania’s most successful emerging businesses.
Every position in this portfolio was taken early, and worked on from the inside — from the small stuff to the big stuff.
Wordsworth
Holding
CompanyApproach
A holding company, not a fund.
We take one seat and use it properly.
There is no fund life, no exit clock and no committee. Capital is our own, decisions are made in days, and we hold for as long as the business is still becoming something.
You keep running your company. We bring the parts most fast-growing consumer businesses find difficult: scaling operations, performance marketing and finance — and the discipline that comes with scale.
What we back
We love branded Romanian businesses, especially in food, drink, hospitality and increasingly wellness. Companies where the market is growing or shifting, and the operating model has not yet caught up.
How we hold
Minority positions, long horizons. We co-invest alongside founders and other private investors, and we are comfortable being the patient money on the register.
Where we sit
Board and advisory seats. Governance counts; sharing experience and knowledge reduces risk and amplifies growth.
What you get
An operator, not an observer. Scaling is rarely a matter of opening more locations. It is operations, production capacity, distribution, marketing and finance — the functions a founder ends up carrying alone, done properly, and the unglamorous work of turning a good business into a repeatable one.
What we look for
A brand people come back for. Branded Romanian consumer businesses, founder-led: food, drink, hospitality or wellness, sold in shops, online or to other businesses — past the first location or the first listing, and honest about what is not working yet.
How it starts
A conversation, then numbers. One meeting to understand the business, a second with the last two years of accounts. No process, no forms, no committee to wait for.
Wordsworth
Holding
CompanyThe thesis
The Wordsworth Way.
Excel individually, thrive collectively
The market has shifted. Tax, wages and input costs all moved at once, and the businesses least able to absorb it are the small, specialised ones customers love most — whether they sell over a counter, online, or to other businesses. Putting resources together is no longer an optimisation — it is how these businesses stay profitable.
What the customer wants
Modern, specialised, personal. Better ingredients, better service, an experience shaped around them. Small independent businesses deliver this better than anyone — it is the one thing scale cannot buy.
What it now costs
Every input has risen, and the tax base moved. Since August 2025 the reduced VAT rates have been merged: finished food sits at 11%, but the raw materials to make it are charged at the full 21%. Gross wages are up around 17%. A single business absorbs all of that alone, on its own purchasing terms, and the margin quietly disappears.
Barriers to scale
Low barrier to entry, high barrier to scale. One founder is expected to be marketing, finance, operations, product and service at once — while investors chasing high-growth tech look straight past them.
The work runs in that order, and the order matters.
One
Electrify the ambition
Most founders arrive with a business that already works and an ambition they have quietly talked themselves out of. The first job is to put it back on the table and take it seriously.
Two
Sharpen the business plan
Ambition on its own is expensive. It has to become numbers that hold — what it costs, what it returns, what would have to be true. Usually the plan gets sharper before it gets bigger.
Three
Then work together
Only once a business knows what it is trying to do does the group become useful. Shared buying, production and distribution save real money — and the ideas travel faster than the invoices.
Distribution
One route to market instead of seven. The same van, the same listing conversation, the same shelf — and one delivery operation serving all of them online.
Production
A cloud kitchen, but for making rather than delivering — shared capacity so a small brand is not paying for a laboratory it uses three days a week.
Buying
Seven order books become one. The terms a group gets are simply not available to one business on its own.
Those three are the obvious ones. In practice the support takes as many forms as there are problems: an introduction to the right supplier, a hiring decision made once instead of seven times, a price list renegotiated, a piece of equipment nobody needs to buy alone, someone on the phone who has already been through it.
Alone is the expensive way. Given what has happened to costs, we do not think consolidation is one option among several. Sharing production, distribution and buying is how these businesses stay open — and each one still gets to taste like itself.
Wordsworth
Holding
CompanyPortfolio
Seven brands we love.
Positions held through The Wordsworth Holding Company — all Romanian, all distinctive, all loved.
Three of them — Origo, Coffeenativ and Brewzeus — are a single coffee system: the green beans, the roastery, the machines and the cafés. Three more are sweet: éclairs, gelato and meringue. Nood is its own thing entirely: no refined sugar, sweet and savoury.
Wordsworth
Holding
CompanyNon-executive roles
Seats taken, time given.
We work in businesses beyond our own portfolio. Formally in non-executive roles, or pro bono work where the business is simply worth helping.
The foundation
The Wordsworth Foundation.
A group earns its place by more than what it owns. The foundation is the part of the company that gives rather than holds — funding work in three areas we believe compound over a lifetime rather than a quarter.
Education
The thing that compounds. Access to it, and the kind that changes what a person is able to do next — not credentials, but capability.
The future of work
Work is being rewritten. We back the people and projects helping others arrive on the right side of that change rather than be left explaining the old one.
The long view
Questions worth more than a quarter. The kind of thinking a business can afford to fund precisely because it is not asking for a return on it.
If you work on something in these areas, or want to know more, write to us.
Ask about the foundation“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils” William Wordsworth
James Simmons
FounderA British consumer executive who came to Romania in 2017 to run Unilever’s operations in the region — and never left.
His career began at PepsiCo, in supply chain and then sales and marketing, and continued through more than two decades at Unilever: latterly as Vice President of Customer Development for the UK business, and then moving into general management internationally.
In 2021 James began to invest in exceptional Romanian businesses, and in 2022 founded The Wordsworth Holding Company as the vehicle for this work.
Write to James directly: james@twhc.ro
James Simmons — career
- Career startPepsiCoSupply chain, then sales and marketing.
- 20+ yearsUnileverMarketing, customer development and general management.
- 2022The Wordsworth Holding CompanyFounded to build Romanian businesses.
- 2026Cris-Tim Family Holding & Dristor Kebap SRLBoard member and board advisor.
The team
Simona Crăciun
Operations — efficiency & integrationSimona started one of the brands on this list. She founded Tort de Bezea in 2016 — one person, one meringue recipe, a small laboratory in Bucharest — and grew it into Tot din Bezea, now five shops and a production kitchen.
Founding it taught her every side of the table: what a founder is carrying, what a supplier is looking at, and what an investor is looking for. Since 2023 she has been building a model for putting resources together, on a simple conviction — margin is not found, it is made: in shared production, distribution and buying.
Wordsworth
Holding
CompanyWords Worth
What we are learning, said out loud.
Most of what a founder needs is held privately by people who have already done it. Two things we are building to open that up — a podcast for entrepreneurs early in the climb, and writing from leaders in Romania and beyond.
“What we have loved,
others will love,
and we will teach them how.”
William Wordsworth
In production
Words Worth
The podcast. Long conversations with people who have built something real — founders, operators and investors from the Romanian market and outside it. Made for entrepreneurs in their first decade: what the decision actually looked like at the time, not the version told afterwards.
Recorded in Bucharest, in English and Romanian.
Hear about the first episode
Writing
Essays and notes
Pieces by Romanian founders and leaders, and by people running businesses elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Published under the Words Worth banner: short, specific, written by the person who lived it.
- BrandBuilding a brand people choose when it costs more
- ScaleWhat breaks between the first location and the fifth
- PeopleHiring senior when you have never managed senior
- OwnershipBoards, governance and giving up some control
Tell us your stories — even the ones where you tried to put chains on the wind.
Write a piece with usWordsworth
Holding
CompanyThe register
Suppliers: apply to be on the list we hand to founders.
What slows a young consumer business down is rarely the money. It is not knowing which packaging plant hits its dates, which agency is worth the retainer, which accountant has seen this before. We are building a vetted register of suppliers and professional services for the Romanian businesses we work with — and the only way onto it is to be genuinely good.
What we ask for
Proof, not a deck. Three clients roughly the size of the businesses we work with, examples of the work itself, honest price ranges, and the names of the people who would actually do the job.
What we check
We call the references. We ask whether you delivered on time, what went wrong and how you handled it, and whether they would hire you again. We look at the last two years, not the pitch.
What it gets you
Introductions, not a directory entry. If you pass, we put you in front of founders inside and around the portfolio — and we only do that for suppliers we would use ourselves.
Already on it
Pick what you do above and the email writes its own subject line. Send what you do, who you have done it for, and two or three references we can call. We read every application and reply either way.
Get in touch
Looking at the same market?
Tell us about your business.
If you are investing in Romanian consumer or hospitality and want to compare notes — or co-invest — write to us directly.
A paragraph on what you sell, where you sell it and what is in the way is enough to start. We read everything ourselves.
Write to the office Send us your business