Page 54 - Nine Yards Magazine 2021/2022 - Old Mutual Corporate

ABOUT THEO
When he was in
Grade 11, Theo used to annoy his mother by telling her that he was going to make it big one day and make her proud. As the founder
of Bathu, he has created 250 jobs and sells around 15 000 pairs of sneakers a month.
bathu.co.za
last thoughts
How it started, how it’s going
From an aha moment in Dubai to starting out in his room in Alex to selling 15 000 pairs of sneakers a month, Theo Baloyi and Bathu have come a long way.
Bathu’s current warehouse supervisor was our first customer five years ago. He bought his sneakers
from the boot of my red 2014 VW Polo GTI, and now oversees our 3 700m2 warehouse. I am not saying this to boast, but perhaps to illustrate
where we started.
The years I spent with PwC
in the Middle East as an accountant taught me the art of patience and concentrating on my objectives, which ultimately led me to achieve my ambitions.
WHAT I WANTED TO ACCOMPLISH WITH BATHU WAS TO BUILD IT RIGHT FROM THE VERY BEGINNING.
I wanted to establish the correct processes to expand the business rapidly. The patience I had learnt at PwC came in handy, as our first hiccup came before we even went into production – I wanted to start with 100 pairs of sneakers, but the minimum factory order was 1 200. We were rejected by 13 factories. We wanted to make the whole shoe from mesh, which held up manufacturing. It took 18 months and 21 samples before we got it right.
Giving up was not an option. The more factories declined my concept, the more eager I grew to get it right. When I finally held the first pair of Bathu sneakers, it felt as if I was holding a baby that had just been born. That’s what it meant to me. We started with 100 pairs on our online
platform and the response was beyond my wildest dreams. The next order – 400 pairs – caused the website to crash and sold out within four hours.
While it’s a dream come true, running Bathu now is vastly different from
what I had expected. My thinking had to shift from that of an
employee who follows rules to taking decisions that are in the best interests of the business. Running Bathu five years ago
was easy; everything was on a smaller scale and most of my
recruitment was informal. Learning to understand each employee and
their behaviour was part of my growth as an entrepreneur.
GROWING AND SCALING A BUSINESS IS ONE OF THE TOUGHEST RACES TO RUN.
Today we have 250 employees, 30 bricks-and-mortar stores, an online shop and five customisation labs nationwide.
#BathuforBathoCareProject, our CSI initiative, launched in June to distribute a million pairs of school shoes throughout South Africa. The first 750 went to Phake in Mpumalanga, where I grew up.
I know there are a lot of numbers here – I am an accountant, after all – but they allow me to keep track of where we came from and where we’re going. I don’t want to look back one day and think that we could have been magnificent, but that I had been too afraid.
50 2021/2022
PHOTO: SUPPLIED
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