Khanyi Dhlomo is CEO of Ndalo
Media and Ndalo Luxury Ventures, and a magazine publisher. She recently flung
wide the doors of Luminance, her luxury boutique department store in Hyde Park,
Joburg, and in doing so has returned to her roots, writes Sue Grant-Marshall
Khanyi Dhlomo was a slip of a
girl, hardly out of her teens, when the boss of South Africa’s
largest media empire decided to make her editor of his top black women’s
magazine, True Love.
That’s
the effect the quiet, reserved but determined then BCom student had on people.
She halted her studies,
temporarily, edited the magazine for eight years, during which its circulation
doubled and awards rained down on it, and then decided to pursue business.
Nearly all her friends and
colleagues thought she was crazy to bow out of so successful an editorship with
its glamorous profile, “and they made sure they told me so”,
says Dhlomo with a wry smile.
Nevertheless, she left for
Paris in 2003 with a BA in Communications and Industrial Psychology, which she’d
gained while simultaneously being an editor and the mother of two babies.
It was while she was manager
of SA Tourism in France and strolling the fashionable streets of Paris, gazing
at their stunning stores, that the idea of Luminance first began to glimmer in
her mind.
But being Dhlomo, she then
dived even deeper into business waters by doing an MBA at Harvard Business
School, Boston, in the United States.
“There were 90 in my class and 900 in my year,”
she says, recalling how hard she worked alongside fellows from all over the
world.
Apart from her excellent
degree, she acquired two other major assets there.
They were top Chicago store
designers, JGA Store Design, Brand Strategy and Retail Architecture, as well as
a network that included entries to some of the top luxury brands in the world.
These include Alexander McQueen, Manolo Blahnik, Giorgio Armani, Carolina
Herrera and Oscar de la Renta.
On her return to South Africa
in 2007, she stuck to what she knew best though, and launched Ndalo Media, a
joint venture between herself and Media24, one of the country’s
leading media companies.
Today, five years on, it
publishes Sawubona (SAA’s in-flight magazine), Destiny and Destiny Man
magazines. It is also the home of DestinyConnect and DestinyMan.com, “two
of South Africa’s fastest-growing social networks for businesspeople
and entrepreneurs”.
It’s
that last word that most defines Dhlomo, for on her return from America in
2007, she told a journalist: “I am, like all my
family, essentially an entrepreneur. The retail business is in our veins.”
Her grandfather, a teacher
and businessman, began buying land in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1930s. In time her
father, Oscar Dhlomo, bought the land and developed shopping centres on some of
it, as well as owning retail businesses.
“My mother ran them. It was due to the stores, which I
used to run in and out of, that my parents were able to provide my excellent
education.”
Dhlomo was the first black
girl at Girls Collegiate, now Wykeham, in Pietermaritzburg. “It
was tough, for my fellow boarders were children of wealthy Natal sugar farmers
whose interaction with black people had been as farm labourers.”
But Dhlomo says that the
experience prepared her “for being on my own in difficult situations as well as
being a pioneer”.
Yet again, she’s
playing the latter role. Luminance is the first boutique department store in
the country – and the first in Africa –
to have such a comprehensive selection of international labels. They sell
alongside African designers with prices ranging from R500 to R90 000.
It looks like an art gallery,
thanks to local John Jacob Interiors, who took over from the Chicago company,
and Dhlomo uses the word ‘curated’ often as she
describes the local art and fashion gracing its elegant shelves.
“We have Imiso ceramics from Cape Town, beaded kitchen
accessories from rural KZN women and art by Nelson Makamo. The latter has sold
some of his work to Giorgio Armani, so there’s a satisfactory
blending and bringing together of local and international products,”
says Dhlomo.
She and her mother, Venetia,
are majority shareholders in Luminance, having invested R15 million in it
together with leading businesswoman Judy Dlamini. They obtained R34.1 million
from the National Empowerment Fund and 58% of the latter funding remains in
South Africa to support the local economy.
The deep pile carpets, muted
lighting and artworks do not invite the usual flick-flack most of us do as we
zip through clothes rails. So seeing children’s
wear that creates images of sticky little fingers on dresses worth R40 000 has
Dhlomo exclaiming that she and husband Chinezi Chijioke have a three-year-old
daughter, “and I’ll make a plan”.
Maybe part of that will be a
daughter following in a mother’s entrepreneurial
footsteps – again.
