A life-changing moment was the catalyst for me deciding that I'm 36 years old, I've worked with a great entrepreneur, I've learned a lot and I think I'm in a position to try something of my own. I naively and quite haphazardly jumped into becoming an entrepreneur at the age of 36.

I was a failed events guy and Ross was a very mediocre builder. We knew nothing about e-commerce, we knew nothing about fashion, we knew nothing about branding, we knew nothing about shoes. Yet, in that moment, we felt super confident that we could start a shoe business. It was pure, joyous naivety.

We were motivated a lot by hope, and by desperation. There's absolutely no doubt that desperation was a big driver. We didn't think of this while sitting in a business class flight to London. Veldskoen was born at a dark time.

Nic Latouf, our previous partner, suggested that we post a video on Facebook. The next day, Ravi Govender, the Sascoc CEO, phones me, It was the most sensational display of how social media can work! It was a fun, very feel-good South African story. 

The reality is that Ross and I never invented the veldskoen. We found that we could create veldskoen and we could make veldskoen something. So when we trademarked it, we made a very conscious decision that we would never, ever stop anybody in South Africa from calling a shoe a veldskoen - we do ask people to be original and not knock us off completely in terms of our signifiers.

We ran an ad on Facebook and the tagline was, “The legend is back”, as if we'd existed before and people thought we were back from the ashes, that we were this massive company that had resurrected itself, and so they took us seriously overnight because we weren't a startup.

It was a challenge to find a manufacturing partner that had that sort of pedigree, that knew how to make a stitchdown shoe, that knew how to make a comfortable shoe, and that also understood early that we might be small, but that if we got it right, we'd be big and that you had to solve for scale early.

We met a guy called Voden Wearne. He'd worked with the family at Hopewell Footwear, and he recommended that we go see them, at the time a stitchdown shoe in the normal manufacturing process was on the decline and South Africa's footwear manufacturing was on the decline. I think they felt our energy, they felt our authenticity and they knew that we were trying to solve something, so they backed us.

The first highlight was when Prince Harry, wearing our shoes, goes to a party in England and is seen wearing our shoes by the editor of The Times. Then there was the Olympics, maybe the biggest visibility moment for a brand of clothing in South Africa. Every South African knew what a veldskoen was, but in the Olympics everybody knew who we were.

You've got to find the right person to pitch to and 90% of the time, that's the hardest part.  LinkedIn is a really good place to find the name of a buyer that could potentially put you in touch with somebody else. It's a telephone game, really. It's not just an email game. You've got to burn the phones to find the right person.