Mambu Staff need your help

A lot of you will recognise the faces of the two special ladies whom we are very lucky to have as the manageresses of our two shops, Alice at the CPT shop and Bibi in the JHB shop.

However behind the scenes in our workshop in Kensington Jhb, there is a whole team ,18 to be exact who make it possible to bring you our beautiful range of Ostrich eggshell jewellery. As you know our jewellery is all hand made, is very labour intensive and takes a great deal dedication. Our team are also extremely experienced and most of them have been with us for many years.

A month and a half ago we were forced to close our workshop as well as our two shops due to the lockdown, this was very sudden although we had started to feel the pinch early on in the year, with sales in our shops much slower than previous years, Jan, Feb, March are normally excellent months for us at our CPT shop but this year not, due to the situation we all find ourselves in.

We had also invested greatly in producing stock for several retail shows and now of course those have also been cancelled and we sit with stock and hundreds of meters of linens we cannot sell.

So to cut the long story short we haven't got a cent coming in at the moment and have been forced to close our workshop for 3 months as our regular wholesale customers have let us know that they will not be ordering, therefore all avenues of Bussiness have ground to an abrupt halt.

It is of great concern to us that as the majority of our support comes from foreigners we don't anticipate much improvement once the lockdown is over. We are due to resume production at the end of June should the lockdown permit and this is a scary prospect indeed as our overheads and in particular our wage bill is substantial.

Just before the lockdown in mid March we assisted our staff in claiming for temporary unemployment benefits (UIF) and although we are fully up to date with our UIF no-one has seen a cent.

We therefore would really appreciate your support, we are aiming to raise R200 000.00 that's roughly $11 000 , as we estimate that this will keep our staff going over two months. this can either be in the form of a donation or a credit for Mambu jewellery from our website. In this time we are planning to set up another business (which will also involve our staff )that will run concurrently with Mambu Design. We are also woking on a very interesting collectible piece which is very apt to these times, we will most certainly keep you posted!

This is an unusual request for us but these are most certainly unusual circumstances.

Thank you and be safe!