Gugu Intimates: The Founding Story
There are seminal moments in life that make up every big event in life. They aren’t always the whole story, but they are what punctuates the end results that everyone gets to see when they ask you how you started something or how you got somewhere. That is how I continue to look back at my own story that I feel like I have told no less than 100 times since launch. Oftentimes I wonder how much of my story is rehearsed and has been distorted by new memories in how I tell it. Then I get that emotional memory – 5 years after that New Years’ resolution that changed everything and I remember why in most of my interviews about why and how Gugu Intimates started, I talk about some businesses being a spiritual calling. This business was clearly part of my destiny.
How did I get started? Well, the first signs of underwear being a later prominent feature in my life come from my very stoic mom who had a wicked sense of humor to boot. My mom ruled the house and the lives of all 7 of her kids, with nothing less than an iron fist. She had a very hard but loving way of instilling what would later be things that endeared me to her and my childhood as values – like matching underwear. Always wear matching underwear. She would burst into the girls’ rooms at any point for a random inspection of our underwear drawers. No warning, but a high risk inspection that could land you a feature spot as the laughing stock at dinner. Her whole thing was that underwear was something of personal pride, your secret to why you feel good. Clean, matching underwear means you are a self-loving, self-respecting being. So you could be labelled as nasty and untidy for hanging onto panties with holes for example – earning a nickname to shame you in the streets. So it’s safe to say, as the youngest and already most vulnerable to bullying from my siblings for the slightest mistake, I took to my underwear drawer with the passion of a future magazine model of some sort. I single-handedly nagged my dad into getting a Woolworths card as soon as I had any sign of boobs because I needed to stock up on enough matching JT One training bras and panties every school holiday. I was never going to be caught slipping! My mom definitely feared that the risk of boys seeing said underwear was high, she got stricter with me.
She was an entrepreneur herself, by the time I hit high school. First black woman tour operator in the SADC region. The pressure. But the strict mom made it so that I did not have time to loiter with boys (who would see my cute underwear, LOL!). So I spent all my after school time at the Tour Company’s offices, across the road from school. That would keep me safe until I finished high school right? Wrong. I did manage to kiss my share of boys and make it through to university, and a very fortunate journey with great companies until I found myself in the world of advertising with plenty of questions and ambitions about brands and branding.
Still a lover of good matching underwear, hoarder in fact – it was completely frustrating when I decided to start wearing more white shorts and t-shirts as part of the new look that was my then ‘aesthetic’. I never know what to wear underneath them though. Some bras and their sexy looking detail just created bumps on a smooth t-shirt, and worse – just trying to find a bra that would sit quietly and humbly under my white garments without stealing the shine was impossible. And it pissed me off in a way I struggled to understand. This gap in the market felt personal, and I could have sworn I felt the collective disregard of African women who saw make-up brands expand their ranges of shades to accommodate our different skin tones.
Why couldn’t they see us? Working as an advertising strategist at a South African independent ad agency at the time, the Chief Strategy Officer (my then boss), encouraged a day in the week where you as a strategist went down a rabbit hole asking a question that didn’t have an apparent answer as to why a product or service solution does not exist. The series of events that followed felt like being pushed off a bungee and there being no way back. I tell the story of standing in the boardroom of one of the big banks, presenting a strategy for a big multi-agency campaign. The light shone in from the windows on one side of the room, directly at me like a spotlight – movie style for a great presentation. Except I was wearing a white collared shirt that day in 2016, and was interrupted by my own thoughts or rather insecurity. What if the whole room is just looking through my shirt with all this light.
And there started the nagging question; if I can match my make-up on this continent with a melanated skin, why can I not find a nude underwear match that sees me? All I found when I took my question to the Google was a sad search result of dusty pink tones presented by most major retailers as nude. In a continent of over 800 million women? This is where that teenage girl who was now dying for matching simple, seamless underwear with no visible panty lines on my tight hugging clothes took it personally. By the end of 2016, New Years Eve looking at the beautiful Lions Head in Cape Town amid deep conversations with a friend about how we would work at feeling more fulfilled with what we were doing in our day to day, by that time the next year – I made a resolution to start something, make something that I needed. Something that, even if it would fail, I would not care to consume a lifetime supply of whatever it was. So there would be no regrets. A win-win for my perfectly A-Type personality that needed to feel like it was safe to do this new, scary thing. 31 December 2016, one year later, I was going to not feel like I was just on a corporate hamster wheel, wasting my talents and gifts.
They say when you follow your bliss, the golden string connected to your heart is pulled as if by magic to show you the satisfaction that comes from taking the leap towards answering questions you feel strongly about. The only sadness from witnessing how doors opened in the year that followed , is that my mom was not physically present to help me though it. We lost her through a car accident in 2010, but the latent wisdom from watching her navigate being a businesswoman, plus all the teen passion for underwear came alive in me as I pursued this new challenge I decided I was the one to solve. All that classical marketing experience from great multinational companies, my Media Studies degree just fused together as all the experience I needed to build the brand, way before I even knew how I would go about even making the product. It was clear – different shades of seamless bras and bottoms in at least 5 shades. A brand that would see us women beyond the hyper-sexualization of brands we were being served. I was writing brand slides as though I was transcribing a movie I was watching in my mind. No idea how to execute, but that did not even matter until I had this document that details Africa’s First Skin Colored Underwear Brand, one that was authentic to its core and focused on solving functional gaps in the underwear category that came up beyond just nude shades.
And roads unfolded. I had just resigned from the ad agency where the idea sparked, and was in between jobs – moving to another agency to work on a Multimedia brand I loved and wanted to have the experience of. I should have been besides myself, a part of me was. The media Studies graduate was proud to have been headhunted for the role. But this notification of an annual underwear and textile fair in visa-free Hong Kong that would feature any and everyone in Asia I could consult about creating these shades I had identified, came up. There are certain things that once you know, you absolutely cannot ‘un-know’. How would I explain that I would go and explore this opportunity in the coincidental Fair dates that fell in the exact number of days leave I had to use up before the new job. The universe was daring me to go! Right? Well, as if that was not enough, I got a payment from an old client who had not paid for a piece of work delivered months prior. Overnight, they decided to pay the exact amount I would need for the flight and 4 nights’ accommodation to see if this nude underwear thing was indeed – a thing. I get goosebumps even thinking of making the call to my dad to explain why I was going to China to look for manufacturing capability when I should have been focusing on winding down to prepare to take on my new exciting role at the new ad agency. Call it two-parts hunch, three-parts insanity, I guess.
And I felt crazy. There were a Lot of things I didn’t understand how my path could have lined up so perfectly to equip me for. Like the list of questions I needed to ask at the Textile fair to narrow down who would not be a waste of my time. All those days in Supply Chain meetings preparing for new product launches at Unilever or SA Breweries (ABInBev for the young ones), all preparation that gave me confidence that surprised even me a little. Why was there a fair on exactly the days I could attend? Well, because nothing can stop an idea whose time has come! That is what I know now.
I came back from Hong Kong with only three supplier names, but one particular factory had a manager, Mattias, who seemed to believe my story about custom dyeing a specific type of fabric to create a minimalistic range of seamless nude underwear. His factory’s minimum order quantities for a custom creation of that nature was insane. I would need to launch with a big wholesaler uptake. But how do you get huge uptake on a product you still have to prove is a NEED? This Mattias guy made a concession, one that could only have been by a guardian angel, now that I better understand that sort of intervention. He agreed to a super low minimum order compared to an entire 3 floors full of suppliers I had interviewed. All I needed to do was develop the “proof of concept” and business case to get money to do this. At this point, I was so emotionally invested that a mere 4 days after starting at the new ad agency on my return – I resigned. I owed it to myself to not spend 8 hours a day on things I did not care about, at the risk of not moving forward with this calling that felt incredibly time sensitive!
The day I bet on myself and got the guts to write my resignation letter, was also the day someone who believed in me called me to offer me an opportunity to work freelance on a new publication launch for 3 months. And just like that, I went from a corporate climber and successfully employed brand strategist and part-time coach, to registering both Gugu Intimates and a boutique consulting agency and launching 18mths after that new years’ resolution. No wholesale contract – just a decision to build it, knowing in my gut that more women like me asked the same question; “Why doesn’t nude in Africa look more like my skin tone? And where are the African owned underwear brands that will see me?”
That may be why we broke the internet on the first day that a group of invited guests shared images of the product at a preview event. We had mentions and interview requests from Joburg to New York. A product and story whose time had come – I was the one lucky enough to follow that instinct and see it through. That is how it started. A few questions that changed the course of my life into an adventure I did not see coming.