BUSINESS
Spreading Ubuntu Through Play BY BROWNSENSE TEAM
Husband and wife co-founders of Toys With Roots Thabo and Mpumi Motsabi are walking with a sense of accomplishment lately, as their three-year business journey bears fruit. Their business was founded in 2015 after they started selling the popular Ntombenhle dolls, upon which they realised that there was a serious gap in the local market for toys that Brownie children can see themselves through. They soon expanded their distribution offering to include other toys, including their own
7
Lali doll, a multi-lingual 10 year old who loves singing. While they initially envisioned Toys With Roots as the much-needed competition to larger, multinational toy shops, they realised that they could use those same stores to distribute the toys and gain a larger footprint across the country, and have since seen distribution to nine different malls in South Africa, including high end tourist and shopping destinations such as the V&A in
Cape Town and Sandton City in Johannesburg. Lali was created in 2016, and she is a labour of love for the couple. Like many Brownies, they were in a position of being forced to manufacture in China, and wished to give Lali an African identity. The BrownSense Market, at which they had been vendors for over a year already, provided them with a platform to meet African designers. They discovered great synergies with fellow vendor Millicent Awino, founder and
