The story behind OMMA

Nastya started OMMA in 2020, looking for an alternative to coffee that didn't leave her anxious and exhausted. That search led her to matcha — and eventually to Japan, where she spent months living with the family of one of OMMA's farmers, learning tea from the inside.

What began as sourcing matcha for friends grew into partnerships with some of Dublin's best specialty coffee shops, and in 2025, a permanent café inside Brown Thomas — the most successful pop-up in the department store's history. Nastya left her job at Google later that year to focus on OMMA full-time.

She was named in Irish Independent's 30 Under 30 (2025) and nominated for the Power of Women Award, Ireland (2025).

Since summer 2025, alongside a partner Kate Aleshnikova, she's now building OMMA's next chapter — including a second Dublin location, and together with her husband and war veteran Pavlo Kucher, a new café in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Scroll down to read through OMMA's highlights and wins, big and small.

  • April 2020 — it all started out of passion. Nastya felt really fatigued by covid and was in search of a drink, a ritual, and a hobby that could uplift her days and mood. Coffee wasn't an option, as it made her anxious, and she couldn't find good matcha in Dublin. So Nastya decided to send a few emails directly to farms in Japan, asking them to send "the real taste" to Dublin.

    Little did she know that this love for Japanese culture — born from the films of Yasujiro Ozu and a sample of real matcha from a farm — would turn into a business a few years later.

  • February 2022 — Nastya holding a pouch of matcha with OMMA's first branding. From this exact image — a girl holding a matcha whisk (chasen) on her head — OMMA's branding began. Matcha became a grounding ritual, a pause amid difficult personal times; whisking matcha felt like a head massage.

    Nastya was about to launch OMMA at the end of 2022, but then war broke out in her home country, Ukraine, and she postponed the launch to an unforeseeable future.

  • April 2023 — first trip to Japan, first meetings with the farmers Nastya had been exchanging emails with. Meeting sixth-generation tea farmer Furukawa-san in Gokasho, Uji, Japan. It's an extra-small family farm where tea grows right beside the house, and everything is done by hand. Every harvest, the head of the farm and his wife call the whole family and friends to help pick tea leaves.

  • April 2023 — visiting our key partner in Shizuoka. Our ceremonial-grade matcha is sourced from a small family farm in Miyazaki prefecture, cultivating first-flush organic okumidori leaves. It's then milled in Shizuoka, one of the oldest tea-producing regions. Our matcha imparts a sweet aroma and light umami, leaving a cashew finish.

    Learning tea ceremony from a tea master with 60 years of experience, whom Nastya now calls her Japanese grandma. Hiroko-san is 84 years old, and her secret to longevity, she says, is curiosity.

  • May 2023 — Nastya holding her first matcha tea ceremony for friends, along with a presentation of her tea expedition around Japan.

  • June 2023 — we launched OMMA in Dublin, in our first café partner — Indigo&Cloth, which we still call home to OMMA. We did our first public but intimate tea ceremony, a matcha workshop, introduced matcha yuzu tonic, and started OMMA's education chapter.

  • 2023–2024 — we were focused on matcha education: building meaningful partnerships with leading cafés around Ireland and beyond — Hatch, 3fe, Sceal — running matcha trainings for their teams, setting up processes on the bar with matcha, doing tea ceremonies, and sharing the unique culture of Japanese tea with Ireland.

  • Autumn 2024 — curiosity and questions turned into a season living in Japan. Nastya spent the whole autumn living with a tea family on a farm in Kakegawa, learning the tea craft from a family that has dedicated three generations to tea, while travelling around Japan and learning from different farmers in Uji, Wazuka, Aichi, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, Shizuoka. This was her second tea expedition around Japan, travelling from Shizuoka, Kyoto, Uji, Wazuka, to Nishio, Fukuoka, Miyazaki, Hiroshima in search of unique tea stories and flavours. She lived on a farm with a Japanese tea family for a month, learning tea ceremony, tea growing, processing, and brewing.

  • April 2025 — OMMA opens its first-ever pop-up café in Brown Thomas (Dublin's central department store), which becomes the most successful pop-up in the history of Brown Thomas. Dublin quickly filled us with queues through the street and brought a new dimension to OMMA.

  • June 2025 — Nastya's best friend Kate Aleshnikova joins forces and joins OMMA to help scale the success, takes over operations and partnerships, and becomes B2B lead — helping grow meaningful partnerships and relationships with cafés around Ireland, the US, Germany, and more.

  • July 2025 — the girls head off on their summer tea expedition, sourcing new-year teas, harvesting with farmers, to understand from within what's happening behind strong statements of shortage and how farmers feel about it.

  • September 2025 — first huge tea delivery arrives in Dublin.

  • April 2026 — OMMA café celebrates its 1st year and turns into a permanent location in Brown Thomas Planet Beauty.

  • May 2026 — OMMA holds their first event in Belfast in collaboration with Graft Collective.

  • June 2026 — OMMA joins forces with LONDI, a Ukrainian-born loungewear brand, and starts a new adventure of building the first me-time space in Kyiv.

  • September 2026 — the LONDI space in Kyiv opens its doors — OMMA's first physical home in Ukraine, built together with LONDI inside their loungewear space. The first me-time corner outside Ireland, and the one closest to Nastya's heart: Kyiv, alongside her husband Pavlo.