South African bead trunk shows and tour.

One day we decided to go on vacation to South Africa, and two friends begged to come along with us. Us being my wife Jme, me, and Jme’s mother (my mother in law) Vi. The two friends were Ben, a jewelry/rock specimen merchant, and Corrine, the wire wizard. She had invented a jig to make wire findings and beaded jewelry. We talked with Corrine and planned to load our suitcases with beads and tools, and she was going to bring her jig, wire and tools so that we could go to bead stores in South Africa and sell beads both to the stores we found and to their customers when we did trunk shows in the stores. That was our plan. 5 weeks in Africa, exploring, and hopefully selling our beads and tools And handing out our business card to potential customers. Neither Ben or Corrine had been to Africa before. They were excited. I was born in Rhodesia and lived in South Africa, and Jme had been there with me a couple of years before, but we were also excited. We flew out from Sacramento via KLM, laying over in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for a day before landing in Joberg. We stayed in a guest house in Pretoria, where we were joined by my mother and her husband George, after they bused down from Zimbabwe to join us for the 5 week holiday. My step brother Tony met us in our guest house because he lived in Pretoria. One of the first things we did was find the source for cactus quartz and bought several flats which we shipped home. That was fun. Then we drove to Kruger National Park to go on an animal photographic safari. One afternoon while Jme and I lounged around the viewing pond Corrine went into the nearest town, and when she came back she had made contact with a retail store in a beautiful shopping center that all the buildings were brightly painted like an Ndebele village, and had organized a trunk show for the next day.

This photo is an example of an Ndebele village, and although it is not the shopping center we had the trunk show, it looked like this.

So the next day we went in and set up all our beads and Corrine’s jigs and wire and tools. The shop owner had phoned all her best customers and put up signs advertising the trunk show. Me, Jme and my mom sold beads, Corrine demonstrated the jig and sold them as well as the wire and other tools. This was the first time my mom had been exposed to selling our beads. She loved it. At the end of the day the shop owner made a wholesale purchase, and we also figured out our sales. We were all happy. Then we were off… next stop, Swaziland. ( it later changed its name to Eswatini). We bought some souvenirs and drove into Durban where I lived for several years in the 1970s. My Uncle Rick owned and ran a coffee farm in KwaZuluNatal, Assagay Coffee, and we toured the farm. And bought sacks of coffee beans. Then we went into Durban and found a bead store. It was gated and locked, and would only let in one customer at a time. No business to be done there. But in town, we went into a large Indian market where Jme bought a huge sack of samosas which we pigged out on . We also had purchased earlier at a butcher shop a huge sack of biltong, which is dried meat, like jerky, but much, much better. Anyway, we drove down the garden route to Cape Town, where we went to the bead shop on Long Street, where we met Katherine LeSeur, the owner. There we did a phenomenal trunk show, selling all day long to her customers. Jme, my mom and I sold like crazy, while Corrine demonstrated her jig and taught classes on jewelry making. We were all so busy. Katherine took us the next day to the Iziko Museum, South Africa’s National museum, where we had a private tour. The high point of the tour was in the director’s office, where we got to hold Nelson Mandela’s ancestral giraffe tail fly whisk.

Later that day we went down to the beach where Jme walked barefooted in the water. Corrine told her to watch out for the ankle sharks. Jme’s eyes got huge, and she ran out of the water. We were laughing so hard, Jme is so gullible!

we couldn’t go up in the cable car to the top of Table Mountain because the clouds covered the top of the mountain, so we drove north towards Johannesburg. A couple of nights we drove until we found a hotel to sleep in or a private house that advertised rooms for rent like a bed and breakfast, and ended up displaying our beads, tools, jigs and wire to the owner who called all her friends and we had an impromptu trunk show. The biggest seller at those little trunk shows was our tools and jigs. In fact, we sold out. Our suitcases were getting lighter and room was being made for our souvenirs. And we had money to spend.

when we arrived at Kimberly, we stumbled on the last San bushman settlement in South Africa, where we learnt about ostrich shell bead making. That was interesting.

Finally we made it back to the guest house in Pretoria where we started from. Corrine and Ben flew up to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and my mom and George caught a bus home, also in Zimbabwe. Eventually the vacation came to an end, and we all flew home. We made quite a few new bead friends who became customers over the years. It was a very profitable holiday.