For Ghia Nadel, it started in 2019 when her grandmother gave her a sewing machine. Nadel was 39 years old at the time.
A fan of recycling, she started to make reusable fabric bowl covers. Then Covid hit, and a friend suggested she make face masks, even though she didn’t have experience in manufacturing.
Nadel, whose father worked for SAA, grew up between Cape Verde, Taiwan and Florida. After finishing high school in the US, she returned to South Africa to study nature conservation. Her dreams of “saving the rhinos” were kiboshed when she was hijacked — and nearly killed — at the age of 17. “I stopped studying ... and I’ve never been back. I have no qualifications. And I’m dyslexic.”
She makes up for it with an ability to sell. She’s gone from air hostessing to selling construction materials — and even tried being a stay-at-home mum. “That was the one job I absolutely hated. I’m not a homebody.”
In March 2020, she began making masks and moved her business into a tiny factory unit in Somerset West, hiring two seamstresses. She was selling thousands a week; then the competition undercut her prices and she knew it was time to pivot. “I’ve always been good at seeing things going pear-shaped before they actually do,” says the self-taught entrepreneur.
When she heard about a struggling bag manufacturer who was selling three machines and letting two staff go, she jumped at the opportunity. “I knew nothing about making bags,” she says. “But the guys I’d just employed did.”
Bags quickly became her focus and also that of her first company, Tra.Dish.Nal, which still makes those reusable bowl covers. Branded corporate orders for golf days and company conferences bring in the bulk of her business.
For a while, it seemed Nadel was onto a good thing, but the rise of fast fashion brands such as Shein and Temu led to her losing 40% of her business in the past three years. Well aware that she could never compete with these Chinese behemoths on price or scale, she decided to focus on her strengths.
“Life’s too bloody serious,” she says.
The idea for sak.sak came in 2023 while browsing the stalls at Kamers/Makers, a business platform for creative, mainly female, entrepreneurs. “There was some nice stuff, but nothing that made me excited to be South African. I could have been at an artisanal market anywhere in the world.”
They built a business around the word ‘skoen’ ... Why couldn’t I do the same with ‘sak’?
— Ghia Nadel
She got to thinking about Veldskoen, a brand she admired: “They built a business around the word ‘skoen’ ... Why couldn’t I do the same with ‘sak’?”
The thing about sak.sak was that she already had the raw ingredients for her new brand: she had the bag designs, she knew how to make them, and she’d already been working with an embroiderer for years. All that needed to change was to give the products funky names and colours. “I’d been making gym and makeup bags for years,” she says. “But the moment I started calling them a lip.sak and a sweet.sak, people started buying them.”
She designed one bag specifically for sak.sak — the unignorable kant.sak. While it might be hard for some to look past the provocative name, the bag is also a well-thought-out unisex accessory that can be worn a few different ways and has earned rave reviews. It’s easily sak.sak’s top seller, and there’s now a personalised option where, for R50 extra, customers can get something less offensive embroidered on their bag. “The best part,” Nadel says, “is that you can fit a bottle of wine in it.”
In sak.sak’s first month, Nadel sold 30 bags. Now, a year later, she’s sold more than 6,000, and the brand is turning over R300,000 a month. “Sak.sak isn’t just carrying my other business, it’s also enabled me to employ three more people, and I’ve already outgrown my factory. I’m looking for a thousand squares, if you know anyone who’s renting ...”
Nadel says she won’t stop till sak.sak is a household name — and she’s determined to do it her way. This means growing the brand organically, without any investors, so she can stay in control of her own business. “I’m a bit of a micro-manager,” she says. “I want to know what’s happening with my customers every day. And, even more importantly, I want to be there to make sure my bags are never made outside South Africa.”
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