Durban - Two local men, who have been buddies for about 20 years, have successfully negotiated the potential problems of a mid-life crisis by sinking all their energy and resources into establishing a new brand in the cut-throat liquor industry.
Clinton Wyness and Wayne Olivier, both 48, have got their Zulu Rum into 127 outlets in KwaZulu-Natal, have just returned from a highly successful tour of Cape Town, and are negotiating with a number of top hotel chains, SAA, cruise operators and luxury train services to take supplies of their product.
Not only that, but they are holding down their day jobs – Wyness as an aviation safety consultant and one of the country’s top-rated aerial photographers, and Oliver as a labour broker.
They are unmarried and enjoy a good party, so are able, at a moment’s notice, to accept any invitation anywhere to push their product.
Wyness says the idea of making rum came to him one day 14 years ago when he was travelling through the sugar cane fields surrounding Durban and he wondered why South Africa didn’t produce rum, as most other sugar-producing countries did.
He chatted to friends and business acquaintances, but of all of them only Oliver really believed in the idea.
It was only in 2012 that everything started to fall into place, when they found a good distiller on the South Coast who used a molasses base.
They had more or less decided on the name for a number of sound marketing reasons – it made their product unique and it’s got a good story behind it.
The Zulu warrior on the label, in relief against the purple background, denotes royalty for Zulus and the British.
The first time that Zulus encountered rum in large quantities was when they overran the British at the Battle of Islandwana.
The cerise on the side of the label denotes the 11 Victoria Crosses awarded after the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, where the British came out on top.
Wyness and Olivier launched their dark Zulu Impi and clear Zulu rum in September, and it’s been a hard grind getting the product known.
They are working on a Spiced Zulu rum, which will fall between the R149 for the dark and R139 for the light.
Their prices are lower than those of the more expensive imported rums, but higher than some of the cheaper imported products.
In October, they were at the International Rum Show in Rome, and their rum was well received.
They were invited to the South African embassy in Rome, where their rums were featured in the cocktails.
Last month, they were in Paris, where they now have a distributor who is going to send samples to 1 300 high-end outlets in France.
One of the high points of their tour was being invited to The End of Apartheid exhibition by photojournalist Grant Fleming in London, where their rums were once again featured on the cocktail menu.
The traditional drink of bikers is rum, and at the recent Bike Africa Week in Margate, all outlets in the town ran out of Zulu Rum, Wyness says.
The men said they had been astonished at the amount of help and encouragement they had received from government institutions, including the embassies in London, Rome and Paris, and, closer to home, Trade and Investment KwaZulu-Natal at the Department of Trade and Industry.
Cheers!
Independent on Saturday