Gone Rural

There are some 100 women beading and producing for Oscar’s business, Gone Rural. Most are the primary breadwinners in their families. Typically, the women support ten people.

Oscar is the chief executive of Gone Rural and the business’s chief designer. He knows what will sell, what will appeal to the international markets and foreign tourists visiting South Africa. He painstakingly briefs the women on his latest designs and then leaves them to carry on, using the skills that have been passed down to them from their mothers and grandmothers.

Two or three weeks later, Oscar returns to quality-check and fetch the pieces the women have created, and to pay them. It can take two weeks to produce 40 bracelets or 50 pairs of earrings. It’s painstaking, exacting but creative work.

The women appreciate the work and they appreciate the money that feeds themselves and their extended families. But Gone Rural is not a charity; it’s a sustainable business that Oscar happens to believe in. He believes in it because it allows him to express himself creatively, and it allows him to empower more than 100 women outside of the metropolis who otherwise would have no means of earning a living other than from social grants.

Gone Rural uses traditional skills to produce exquisite contemporary Zulu beadwork, including bracelets, earrings and necklaces, plus corporate gifts. Comments Oscar: “We pride ourselves on the quality of our work, that and its uniqueness and the particular colour combinations we use.”

Oscar’s travels take him not just to the areas around Durban but much further afield. He regularly attends trade exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Paris and it is largely thanks to the contacts made at these expos that the orders keep coming in, the orders that keep Gone Rural’s ladies working.

Gone Rural has an outlet at the hugely popular uShaka Marine World theme park in Durban and it sells at the Rosebank Rooftop Market in Johannesburg but, says Oscar, “you won’t find our products in any other shop around town”.

Largely schooled in Swaziland, Oscar studied business and marketing management before spending  ten years working in the foreign exchange department of a leading South African bank. “I just became bored with counting money that did not belong to me,” Oscar laughs about his decision, reached in 1992, to strike out on his own. He’d always been creative, and for three years before going into the crafts business as a professional, had peddled his wares at flea markets in and around Durban. His decision to become a full-time crafts entrepreneur was motivated as much by his yearning to use his creative talents full-time as his belief that the industry could be used to trickle down work and benefits to rural communities. Twenty years later the success of Gone Rural has proved Oscar’s hunch to have been correct.

For eight years Oscar has worked with TEP, an organisation which he says has “always been at the forefront of empowering small enterprises”.

“TEP have been very helpful in terms of making things like brochures and in assisting financially when we attend international shows.”

Within the newly-formed local tourism cluster, Oscar believes that he has a particular role to play in ensuring that rural communities benefit from the spin-offs created by a growing tourism industry. He says: “Our particular aim at Gone Rural is to continue helping, developing and empowering women in rural areas, the areas that have been neglected. If they can be empowered, they can form their own businesses.

“With the assistance which TEP is offering small entrepreneurs and medium enterprises I would like to see empowerment happening not only in the metropolitan areas but also in the rural area, where there is the greatest need for the kinds of assistance which TEP is offering.”