Durban entrepreneurs Miona Naicker and Rene Naidoo have established Simply Summer, a beauty business founded on shared friendship and collaboration. The duo launched the brand to foster unity within the local commercial sector and create growth opportunities for lesser-known enterprises.
Durban Entrepreneurs Launch Simply Summer to Build Local Business Community
The Origins of Simply Summer
The business partnership began following a dream experienced by Naicker. “I actually dreamt about this business. The next morning, I woke up, and I was like, ‘Rene, I just had this dream and I believe that God put this in my mind, and do you want to start this together?’ And she was like, ‘Of course.’ And that’s basically how the business came about. It was actually the easiest decision,” Naicker said.
According to the founders, their long-standing personal relationship provides a foundation of trust necessary to handle business challenges. “Rene and I have been a constant in each other’s lives for such a long time, through the good and the bad, so there's a huge amount of trust between us. And, if everybody knows us, they know we are not one without the other,” Naicker stated.
Fostering Collaboration Among Local Businesses
Naidoo emphasized that the brand approaches the market through a lens of collective growth rather than competition. “We always felt it was never a competition between each business, because we know with local businesses, it's really hard for us to make it out there and for everybody to see, including different businesses,” Naidoo explained.
By using their established customer base, the founders aim to introduce consumers to other emerging enterprises. “With customer base and with the following that we have, we get to show that to another business that may not have it, and we get to be introduced to them as well,” Naidoo noted.
The entrepreneurs intend to shift consumer focus away from dominant corporations and toward smaller operations. “We want to show the community that it's not always the big brands that make us a business or make us a business that people want to see. It's the ones that people don't really know about. It's the ones people don't really see often. So we want to give a base that we weren’t given when we started to other small businesses,” Naidoo said.
Related reading