Got a question? The answer is Lamu

Sometimes life does not go according to plan.

You may have worked your bottom off and created a viable business that serves a giant blind spot in the market, namely the idea that flesh-colored intimates should not just be all shades of pink - skin comes in many more shades.

You may find that your sweat, blood and tears, plus some very real intellectual property, mean nothing to a very large national retailer who takes your business and runs away with it.

You may complain, you may despair, but what are you going to do?

This was where Gugu Nkabinde found herself in 2021. It was lockdown and she was running out of runway with Gugu Intimates, a brand she had built from scratch with the kind of wholesale vigour and single-minded dedication you need when you are an entrepreneur filling a gigantic void in the market.

The “exile baby”, as she describes herself — her father is a South African who went into exile in Zimbabwe during apartheid and her mother was from Zimbabwe — grew up in both countries and has a pan-African outlook. 

She is possessed of a vibrant personality that can ignite a fire under the most lacklustre idea — never mind some really good ones. But back in 2021, her own fire was being rained on.

Gugu’s answer to the existential question of what to do is Lamu, the island on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. After her description of the uncanny healing magic of the place I feel she should be immediately appointed honorary ambassador, because if I wasn’t sitting in the lovely courtyard at La Cucina di Ciro feasting on Italian cuisine,  I would be packing my bags and catching the first flight out of here.

As it is the courtyard is decorated in a colourful, effervescent style that is giving beach bar vibes. I am just going to pretend I am in Lamu and enjoy the feast that Ciro has been consistently serving up for decades.

Gugu tells me: “I was initially going for two weeks on this birthday trip to Kenya, but I just knew when I walked off the jetty in Lamu. I  packed up my house, gave most of my furniture to my nephew, put the rest in storage and told my dad I was going back there for at least a year. My family thought I had lost my mind.”

But Gugu, a brand strategist who completed the Unilever graduate programme after studying at the University of  the Free State and has since brought her whip-smart energy to an adoring swathe of South Africa’s corporates and advertising agencies,  had found the answer to work-life balance

On Lamu she found she could work smart, take advantage of the time difference and still walk the beach at sunrise and sunset every day. She worked through her heartbreak and found a spectacular eclectic community of like-minded global expats and grounded herself and her creativity in a spiritually meaningful way.

I was initially going for two weeks on this birthday trip to Kenya, but I just knew when I walked off the jetty in Lamu. I  packed up my house, gave most of my furniture to my nephew, put the rest in storage and told my dad I was going back there for at least a year. My family thought I had lost my mind

Now her projects and her time are led by a desire to connect and make the change she wants to see. There is the Kenyan artisan making  baskets out of prayer mats who she helped with patents and a South African market, and her role  as head of the curatorial team of the Handmade Contemporary Fair (HmC), which has been a mainstay of Johannesburg’s social calendar for more than  a decade, and is taking place this weekend in Melrose Arch.

The fair speaks to Gugu as a person who understands both the gritty and difficult day-to-day reality of setting up a business in the creative economy in the South African market, and as a brand strategist who has worked on some of the world’s most powerful brands.

“We needed the HmC to come back after Covid and remind people that we are here and that it’s a great property, and the world is ready for artisanal luxury brands. There are different tiers and different types of makers.”

Her aim with this, her first foray into this space, is to create useful business-to-business connections  between makers. 

But more than anything this is personal. “Lamu was like a journey into ‘what is my role coming back?’ and I realised that I need to stand for makers, because I was a one-man band, but it was the luck I had in my grooming and in my corporate career, but not every entrepreneur has that background.

“They are usually the talent but they could not be bothered about a bill of materials.  I want to step in and show the makers that you can transcend the issues. You don’t always have to be a 10-item candle-maker; you can stay handmade and embrace technology and scale up.

“That's what I want to do more of — mentor, handhold the makers who have come on board to HMC and who may not even know what to do with the stand. We are not there yet but we are building the platform.”