We believe in community!

Community - this can mean so many things, but to us, it is who supports us and in turn we try to support them. Them? From the young lady who used to help us out in the afternoons after school so that she could give the little that she earned to her dad - a single parent trying his best... to the crafters in the community who purchase small packets of beads from us to make something beautiful to sell in order to provide for their families... and we sell their finished goods in our store giving them 100% of the items' price. Community means giving, caring, sharing...

I used past tense above due to the chaos that lockdown has caused! As we have not been allowed to trade during lockdown, not only has our own household had no income, but we have not been able to employ / pay the young lady, and with no tourists and no clients, none of our crafters products have sold thus no income for them either! It goes so much further than just our shop not being allowed to trade!

We have helped out with what ever we had to spare (I am grateful to my sister-in-law who has ensured that we at least had the basic groceries), but wish we could have done more. Since lockdown has lasted so long, the father of the young lady has been retrenched and he soon has to move out from where he was renting (accom was part of the employment)... we cannot afford to keep her as staff on a daily basis, and we need to give something to our crafters as they too have not been able to sell any of their goods - anywhere as most places have been closed for months already! (and our sister-in-law cannot afford to help us out any longer as her husband has been diagnosed with terminal stage 4 lung cancer so he is no longer working, and his medical expenses have dried up all their savings as well! Cancer treatment in SA is around R2mil with no guarantees that he will even get better or improve!)

We have thankfully been able to start trading again, but it is tremendously quiet - some days we don't even make one sale. I honestly doubt that many people within our district will have money to spend on anything more than the basic essentials at this stage. So we have come up with another plan... what can we make that people could possibly want or use, and who can we employ to make these goods? We will have to start small, but if we could at least employ the young lady's father, that would mean that they would be able to have a roof over their heads and to have groceries... as we progress, we will be able to employ her again and then to also sponsor our crafters until their items start to sell again (possibly only in December, if not next year - depending on when tourists will come).

We have invested in a few machines with what little we had set aside in savings as to try and generate income by making things ourselves - and to help our crafters too. The place where we purchased the machinery from is a sad story on it's own - they were forced to close down with lockdown and they sold off their machinery to us at bare minimum prices in order to get some sort of income to look after their own artists - the foot and mouth painters of the Southern Cape. With their machinery, we have told them that we will do all their laser cutting at no charge so that they can still have items to sell for fundraising without it costing them anything. For other charities in the area, we will continue our policy of at cost price to help their own fundraising (still no profit for us). With this machinery, we can also focus on making the educational products that I designed during lockdown as I think that many parents will not be sending their children to school in a hurry - and one cannot afford to lose any more time on education!

As we covered the costs of the machinery ourselves, this "gogetfunding" effort of ours is to get raw materials so that we can employ some people from the community which in turn will be able to generate an income for many families - from those assembling and packing the products, to those earning commissions from selling the products... and anything to spare will go towards our artists. We don't want anything out of this funding (except to obtain the raw materials for manufacturing), but want to use this opportunity to help others via employment and donations, etc. We have always believed in paying it forward (and have done so for years), but now we kindly ask for your help in joining us in this endeavour.

Thank you for caring!

PS. Community is people and their pets... One cannot forget those who cannot speak for themselves...