Twenty-five years building small manufacturers into bigger ones. Four businesses failed. The fifth, Houtlander, ran without me by 2024. Then Daily became Dwela in nine months. This is how.

I trained first in the paper crafts — papermaking, printmaking, picture framing — then moved to wood under the architect Richard Stretton. At 24 I founded Blue Collar, a bespoke kitchen studio that won Elle Decoration South Africa's Best Kitchen Design award two years running, and then went under. Three more design and manufacturing businesses followed it down. I count those four failures as my real qualification: each taught me a way a making business dies, and everything I have built since is designed against them. In between came a year fitting out superyachts under the Austrian master cabinetmaker Robert Kronhaus, where perfection was the only standard that survived.

In 2015 I co-founded Houtlander, a studio that treats advanced technology as an enabler of craft rather than its replacement. Its Spindle Back chair — a year in engineering, fourteen minutes in production — has sold in its thousands. The work I speak of first is the Hlabisa Bench: a collaboration with Thabisa Mjo and the master weavers of Hlabisa, led by Beauty Ngxongo, that carried a centuries-old Zulu craft into the Centre Pompidou. I sold my shares to my co-founder in 2024.

In 2020 I co-founded Always Welcome, a designer-owned retail collective built to give southern African studios their own shelf space. It grew to stores in South Africa, Namibia and Germany, and it closed in 2024. I carried the losses myself, and I teach from it. For the American Hardwood Export Council I created and oversaw production of two editions of Future Heirlooms; at Always Welcome I designed and produced the HUT Design Challenge.

Now I do this as a working partner, not a consultant. I invest my time and skill in a business, I am paid from the growth we make together, and I leave on a date set at the start — when the business owns its range, its factory, its people and its systems.

A consultant who has only succeeded is describing the weather. One who has drowned knows where the rocks are.