Da Gama Textiles has been making Three Cats Shweshwe material for 60 years. There are 50 000 micro entrepreneurs (the mamas) who buy between 8m and 12m every Monday to sew traditional dresses for friends, initiation ceremonies, weddings, and funerals. Traditional advertising ways of driving sales was not working, so through the process of Trenovating, we came up with the idea of developing these mamas into shweshwe-preneurs to regain market share from the fong kong material producers. We set up the Three Cats Academy where they could be trained in a 5-day course helping them change the way they sell through a ‘Tupperware party’ style process. Creating better shweshwe-preneurs gave Da Gama a more sustainable growth process.
