Prince Harry’s giant step in local vellies
Prince Harry given Veldskoen brand on high-profile tour of SA
● A veldskoen business making waves locally and abroad has made it into the British media after Prince Harry, who is currently touring the country with his wife, Meghan Markle, wore the brand.
The brand — succinctly named Veldskoen — was launched two-and-a-half years ago after Neil Dreyer and his friend Ross Zondagh were chatting about how the South African Olympic team in Rio looked so dismal in their Chinese tracksuits.
“They could have been wearing veldskoene, and that’s how it started,” Dreyer said.
“I’m an ex-hotelier and Ross is an exbuilder but we applied ourselves and when we saw how veldskoene could be seen through a more colourful, fashionable lens, it started to make more sense. We started to work inside e-commerce to sell our shoes.”
The goal was to create an iconic item of South African apparel, and not just for fashionistas or hipsters. “We want to create SA’s iconic shoe … a little bit like the Havaiana is for Brazil.”
This week Veldskoen handed a pair of shoes specially made for Harry and Meghan to the British high commissioner at a Cape Town event in honour of the royal couple.
The shoes were embroidered with a crest and a vine bearing an English rose and a Californian poppy. “The vine signifies SA, the rose England and the Californian poppy Meghan,” said Dreyer.
The prince isn’t the only high-profile person to wear the shoes; Dreyer says Princess Charlene of Monaco has a pair.
Some of the investors are also celebrities — they include US actor Ashton Kutcher and Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and investor on the Shark Tank reality show in the US.
South Africa-born entrepreneur Stephen Watts and his wife Angela introduced the highprofile investors to Veldskoen after they won on Shark Tank in 2016 with their Slyde Handboards.
Veldskoen has just one set of financials under its belt and is in its second financial year. But it attracted the attention of Brian Joffe’s Long4Life shortly after launching, and within a year the investment company — which has brands such as Sportsmans Warehouse, Outdoor Warehouse and Sorbet — had taken a 49% stake in Veldskoen.
Dreyer and Zondagh used the money to scale up the business over 10 months, expanding from three employees to the current headcount of 18.
In its early days Veldskoen kept 400 pairs of shoes in stock at any one time, but now the figure is at least 5,000. Turnover stands at about R9.2m.
Veldskoen’s US operation, called Calibuntu, sells about 800 pairs of shoes a month online in the US and a similar number to customers elsewhere in the world. SA is still the biggest market and the company has sold 30,000 pairs in total so far. Prices range from about R900 to R1,300.
Veldskoen’s head office is in Paarden Eiland in Cape Town, and the shoes are manufactured by Hopewell Shoes in Durban.
“It’s a real partnership. They’re making veldskoene and they have to be super comfortable, really well made,” Dreyer said.
“At a time when things are a bit depressed it’s offered an alternative South African story for entrepreneurs. We consider ourselves custodians of Veldskoen; and the South African public has gotten behind it.”
Dreyer and Zondagh have launched online in Australia and are talking to David Jones about selling the brand in the Australian retailer’s stores.
Veldskoen has become the first local fashion footwear brand to be stocked in Woolworths, a retailer that normally sells only its own-name apparel.
Dreyer and Zondagh first met while they were pupils at Pretoria Boys High and later invited another friend and alumnus, Nic Latouf, to join their partnership.
“We’re mates,” Dreyer said. “Nic has a digital advertising background and was one of the first who saw the product and believed in it. There was a time when some people thought it was a bit farcical.”
Dreyer says they’ve had much positive feedback from South African expatriates, from Seattle to Washington and London. Many of them had asked how they could get involved in Veldskoen.
He says the origins of the veldskoen were the animal-hide footwear worn by the region’s indigenous Khoi people.
When South African troops went to fight in World War 2 in Egypt and Morocco, they wore veldskoene, Dreyer says. “Those troops came back and … wore them in the fields.”
A report in GQ magazine in 2012 said the South African troops had commissioned Egyptian cobblers to make veldskoene for them when their army boots wore out.
During the war, Nathan Clark, greatgrandson of one of the founders of British shoe brand Clarks, was impressed with the veldskoen and used it as inspiration for the Clarks desert boot.
“We’ve been sitting on this incredible bit of history in SA without knowing it,” Dreyer said.
Part of what makes Veldskoen’s product different is the brightly coloured laces: the red version is “pinotage”, the blue is “J-Bay” — which Dreyer calls “the greatest surf spot in Africa” — the yellow is “Vilakazi” (for the street by that name) and the black is “safari”.
Dreyer is CEO and co-founder of Digital Online Retail Products (Dorp), Veldskoen’s holding company.