By Sizakele Nduli
While many people start businesses to generate profit, the co-founder and CEO of Zibangwenya Supplies, trading as ZS Uniform, is driven by a deeper purpose of giving back to her community. Khabonina Mnguni’s decision to start her uniform retail business came after her cousin, Khosi Nkoko, who is the company’s COO and a professional designer, received an order to make school skirts in 2019.
The order, which required producing around 50 to 70 skirts, led them to conduct further research into the school uniform market. They then discovered that there were no large-scale school uniform retailers based in Tembisa. Mnguni officially launched ZS Uniform in 2020 while still working in the corporate sector. With 13 years of experience in marketing and finance, she found the business far more fulfilling than her day job. “In my 9-to-5, I didn’t find joy in the work that I was doing. So, when I started the business, it just really gave me a lot of hope,” she told Vutivi News.
Since launching the business, Mnguni has already implemented initiatives like the Fudumala School Jersey Initiative, with sponsors backing efforts to provide school jerseys to learners. “So, we started it in 2023…, we were able to deliver 90 jerseys. And then last year we worked in partnership with Sandvik to deliver 570 jerseys,” she said, adding that their target for this year is well over 1000 jerseys.
Mnguni said they hoped to expand the initiative nationwide and eventually across the continent. They also launched the Our Threads for iKasi Foundation, a heartfelt initiative designed to empower students by supplying uniforms, toiletries, and other essentials while equipping them with important skills. The journey to success in Mnguni’s business has not always been easy. She recalled that one of the major obstacles she faced was the size of uniforms.
Despite starting with just three schools, she quickly discovered that their uniforms didn’t match the specifications. High school sizes were mistakenly ordered for primary school uniforms, and some primary school sizes were in men’s dimensions. “We had sizes that were meant for high school, but they were in kiddie sizes. For primary school, we had sizes for high school that were in men’s sizes. Even just ordering the stock for the specific schools, the timing of it—I mean, we only got our first order of uniforms, I think, in February, when some clients had already placed orders with us. It was so stressful,” she said.
Mguni reiterated that understanding the complexities of supplier relationships and the exact specifications of school uniforms was no easy feat. To overcome that, Mnguni said she had to learn how to get the correct sizes, identify which suppliers specialised in specific items, and know which supplier offered the best quality at a reasonable price.
The uniform retail business, which supplies school, security, cleaners, and corporate uniforms, has come a long way since its inception. “Now we are actually manufacturing some of the items ourselves,” she said, adding that they started producing some of the uniforms in-house just a month ago. “As of today, we have two full-time shop assistants, a part-time cleaner, and a part-time retail assistant. We also have an intern who is funded by another programme and works with us full-time, so she’s going to be with us for two years, and we also have a seamstress that we’ve recently taken on,” she said.
