Sphiwe Jele played with ice cream sticks one evening at his home in Philippi – a township in Cape Town &#8211; and was surprised at the interesting pattern they formed. &#8220;I thought: &#8216;Oh, I can make a bag'&#8221;. That night he couldn&#8217;t sleep from excitement.
The next morning, Jele started gathering ice cream sticks at bus terminuses and taxi ranks from Sea Point to Mitchell&#8217;s Plain. Soon, children ran to him with their ice cream sticks or collected them and placed them next to his gate. Cafes stored them for him in bags.
&#8220;You need to go crazy for what you love,&#8221; he said.
Backpacks made from ice cream sticks marked the start of his wooden bag business in 2014. He named it Panashe Design &#8211; panashe means the presence of greatness. His kiosk attracts many tourists, but locals too. Each bag is a novelty with a unique handmade design, selling for between R1,000 ($75) and R5,000 ($380).
&#8220;I enjoy doing things properly, refined,&#8221; says Jele.
From ice cream stick bags, he embraced oak, pine and bamboo, combining some with platinum. &#8220;Camps Bay for the premium platinum range, it&#8217;s more of a celebrity vibe,&#8221; he says.
The 28-year-old, who has worked in fashion, decor and design since he was 15, is self-taught in wood.
Soon, he became so busy he formed a partnership with Vuyo Vannucci Ndifor, who has years of  experience in the fashion industry and started collaborating with artist Aurel Okuka Mokando, who&#8217;s also a beatboxer.
<div id="attachment_32981" style="width: 362px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32981" class=" wp-image-32981" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Sphiwe-Jele-2-300x203.jpg" alt="" width="352" height="238" />Sphiwe Jele (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
They used to operate from a kiosk, in Long Street, smaller than Nelson Mandela&#8217;s Robben Island jail cell. The vibrant street with its clubs, pubs and clothing stores was ideal, the entrepreneur says.
He occupied one of 10 on-street kiosks, selected from 250 applicants by the provincial economics department. Others sell sandals, beauty products or T-shirts. The side wall of the large provincial legislature was broken open to accommodate the traders who operate side by side.
Jele is the only one who works at night, creating a splash of light in the otherwise bare section of the street.
&#8220;At night, it&#8217;s like an awareness campaign. So much visibility,&#8221; he says.
He marketed his bags in Sandton, Johannesburg, in April last year to reach &#8220;the high-end market&#8221; while visiting his mother, Jane Sibanyoni, a daycare center owner in Mamelodi, Pretoria.
Suddenly, he heard he was chosen and should open his kiosk within days. He sold a bag for R800 ($60) and travelled back by bus.
Initially, Jele slept on the kiosk&#8217;s floor on a space as big as a lilo. But recently, he found a room he shares with Okuka Mokando, who paints curvy designs in subtle shades on the bags, reminiscent of henna tattoos.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a platform for my art and people carry them around constantly,&#8221; says Okuka Mokando.
Curious onlookers, bus commuters, clients or buddies leaned on their working desk for a chat. There was a My City bus stop in front of his kiosk and a coffee shop on his left. On the right, there was an art piece resembling the frontal frame of a double-storey house, where a religious group gathers to sing, homeless rest and protests are held. A camping chair in front of his kiosk was mostly occupied by a friend.
Being 100 meters away from every night&#8217;s pumping party-zone, the kiosk created much buzz, but it&#8217;s not so distracting Jele had to stop working.
Eddie Xolo, a bag and jewelry designer, ordered a bag the first time he walked past, saying: &#8220;He caught my eye&#8221;.
Sabine Martin from Strand, who specializes in lamps adorned with feathers and horns, is his main international distributor, focusing on London.
She once told him she was going to clear his stock, leaving him with nothing to sell, which made him work really fast. Martin&#8217;s one cupboard is filled with Jele&#8217;s bags.
&#8221;He&#8217;s got skills like nobody. He works his ass off. I love his use of raw materials. My passion is wood. My entire house is wood,&#8221; she says.
They met when she walked past and stopped.
&#8220;She wanted 10 by the end of the next week. I kept producing, being creative. She helped me improve my designs,&#8221; says Jele.
Now, he&#8217;s making about 70 bags a month.
Martin ordered a bag with blue-dyed Springbok skin draped over one of the wooden bags. She asked Jele to not allow it to be touched, which many people wanted to do, but he agreed.
&#8220;The way he puts it together is amazing. I&#8217;ve got bags you won&#8217;t believe. I don&#8217;t even want to sell them they&#8217;re so beautiful. Nobody makes them. I found a similar one in China, but it was plastic that looked like wood,&#8221; she says.
Martin is such an admirer of Jele&#8217;s work she currently has him working from a workshop and office set up at her Strand home. From here they distribute the bags to high-end clients. Jele plans to open a new shop in Long Street, big enough to have a workshop at the back, as soon as he&#8217;s made enough bags.
US tourist Andrea Thomas bought two bags. Jele gave her one for free. &#8220;Then she got eight people to buy bags.&#8221;
He gave his last ice cream stick backpack to a child whose grandmother accompanied him.
&#8220;That same day, someone bought four bags. If you give, you receive,&#8221; says Jele.
Jele has worked for a Levi store at the Waterfront his father, Calvin Mabuza, managed, and LA Jeans, Street Fever, Converse, Catz, Cashbuild. He even found time to be a DJ.
He completed six law subjects at an EFT college and chaired the NGO Creative Youth Development.
Shortly after completing matric, a life changing experience required him to care for his father for a year and a half. Mabuza was shot and crippled during an armed robbery. Jele held his father&#8217;s transport business together.
&#8220;I learned that if you&#8217;re determined, you can achieve anything. A lot of people support me. And for a lot of people to support you, you have to be humble enough,&#8221; he says.

Success Is In The Bag For This Entrepreneur

It doesn&#8217;t look like much but it&#8217;s the first of its kind on African soil that could turn a stinking problem into a profit. This $400-million plant takes the black rubbish bags of Cape Town, with their rotting food and heaven knows what else, and converts it into gas – methane and carbon dioxide – for sale.
The plant, owned by New Horizons Energy, a subsidiary of Clean Energy Africa, is the fruit of five years of planning with family-owned Waste-Mart, one of the largest waste collectors in the city. It was also backed by African Oxygen (Afrox) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
This machine was born of a shortage of holes in which to put rubbish in Cape Town.
&#8220;WasteMart brings in 500 tons of waste a day. Cape Town produces 2 million tons a year. It goes to landfills sites and sits useless. We plan to convert 10 percent of Cape Town&#8217;s waste into something. The city of Cape Town, in effect, has become our mine,&#8221; says New Horizons Energy CEO, Egmont Ottermann.
<div id="attachment_4621" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4621" class="size-medium wp-image-4621" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/biowaste-plant_JC-2-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Preparation of apricot juice for the plant.</div>
It is a 15-year dream Ottermann has realized. He says he first came up with the idea when looking at how to make gas that is produced in the cement industry.
At the heart of this are millions upon millions of bugs that live inside the huge vats and eat the rubbish to produce the methane. In their teething days they were fed nothing but cow manure before moving on to 50 tons of apricot juice. The bugs will mature in May and be strong enough to chomp their way through waste, turning it into valuable gas.
“We’re very excited about the plant. It can help to replace imported fuels by taking the waste and making gas out of the resource. Most importantly, it’s creating jobs. We also believe that there is massive opportunity for replication throughout South Africa and Africa,” says Raoul Goosen, the IDC’s Green Industry Specialist, who played a vital part in securing a 60% finance backing for the project.
The plant will release 20 tons of carbon dioxide and 540 gigajoules of biomethane, which Afrox will buy.
“For Afrox it&#8217;s a sustainable green offering that our customers are looking for. It&#8217;s a good news story from birth to graveyard in terms of managing a waste stream,” says Silvia Schollenberger, Afrox Head of Commercial and Projects.
&#8220;We found there was more value to the industries of biogas, rather than energy. Cape Town has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. Afrox has seen shortages of carbon dioxide and methane, especially in summer, so this is a good idea on various levels,” says Ottermann.
Ottermann believes there’s more rubbish than time.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not the silver bullet solution, but it&#8217;s a start. The idea is to use 100 percent of the landfill. We’re enhancing the recycling economy. There’s great potential in the future to make products such as plastic bricks and roof tiles. Over the lifetime of this plant, we expect many more little industries to be established close to the plant, so that we can drive zero waste to landfill.”
Where there&#8217;s muck there&#8217;s brass – there is also gas.

Rubbish. Bugs.  Profit.

One moment you’re looking at a glossy billboard on the side of the road and the next you’re carrying it in the form of a chic bag.
Moipone Ntseke and Lise Kuhle, owners of StarBorn Creative Designs in Johannesburg, are in their own way transforming the way we view the world by reinventing unlikely objects – in this case, discarded billboards – and creating utility items out of scrap.
“As an entrepreneur, you’re an opportunist but a very good opportunist. Where the need arises for you to provide a product and where there’s a loophole, you enter. The green market was growing, it still is growing, and I wanted to penetrate it,” says Ntseke.
Founded in 2011, the company designs and manufactures laptop bags, iPad covers and sling bags using PVC from recycled billboards, then swathed in shweshwe, a printed dyed cotton fabric widely used in traditional South African clothing.
They also source used soles and create shoes from the bits. Ntseke knows her target market and ensures the bags they make match the shoes. The shoes are then sold in bags made out of discarded cushion covers. For Ntseke and Kuhle, everything has a use.
“The last thing companies want to do is see [their billboards] when they’re done. So they dump it, they dump it to us,” says Ntseke.
The duo also fashions African-inspired jewelry, which have appeared on South African television shows Generations and Muvhango.
The designs are sold to companies for corporate events and can often be found at Johannesburg’s local markets.
Ntseke and Kuhle work with Out of the Box Skills, a skills and training NGO in Germiston, in the east rand of Gauteng, a province in South Africa. The community functions like an ecosystem, helping each other as skills are learned and passed on. Members of the community are taught to sew and screen-print. The billboards are washed, cut and sewn.
“I had the design [ideas] but I didn’t have the skills and if there’s already a cooperative or organization with skills, why not empower them?” says Ntseke.
Ntseke grew up in a two-room shack outside her maternal grandmother’s house in Soweto, a predominantly black township. Her inspiration for her business was simple.
“I started with something I like so we began with jewelry. I learned a three-day [jewelry making] course in eight minutes. I think it was a record,” she says.
Ntseke then partnered with Kuhle, the brain behind the billboard bags. One can argue that their handmade creations are selling themselves.

Tag: Bags

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Success Is In The Bag For This Entrepreneur

Rubbish. Bugs. Profit.

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