Johannesburg - A Vosloorus-born “kasi boy” who is making furniture for big hotels is aiming to spread his wings all over, providing services to the hospitality industry across the country with a big dream of one day becoming a significant role-player in the field.
Although Thato Senosi, 36, produces, maintains and repairs furniture for big and small hotels and bed and breakfasts, he does not sideline household demands.
The managing director of his own Magauta Designs and Projects operates a workshop from Randburg in Gauteng. He is working on a process of opening workshops in five more provinces as he currently has only one in Gauteng.
His dream is to make Magauta a household brand. Currently, some of his staff members travel to provide repairs and maintenance to hotels in KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo.
Magauta provides services such as re-upholstery and refurbishing, custom-built furniture, bedroom furniture, outdoor patio furnishings, and dining-room suits. He also does French polishing, which he described as a rare skill in South Africa.
“By providing such service (French polishing) to the hotels sets us apart from others,” said Senosi.
The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition and Proudly South African last year launched a www.proudlysa.co.za website to market well-established and up-and-coming local manufacturers, especially those who are in the furniture industry. There are more than 40 furniture producers who are marketing themselves on this website, and there are few who seem to be black-owned.
Among the giant hotels that use Senosi’s services are Beverly Hills Hotel in KwaZulu-Natal and Garden Court Polokwane Hotel in Limpopo.
“We don’t make much money as yet, but our annual turnover for the previous years would be around R3 million to R4 million. That is how big we are,” said Senosi.
He provided jobs for nine people – four at the workshop and three on-site. He owns this business despite having no formal qualifications in furniture production. The idea of developing the business came up when he was working as a maintenance supervisor for one of the hotels.
“I saw the space, and the business started with making repairs and re-upholstering and later we moved on to manufacturing,” he said.
But he still does not make the mistake of employing just anyone, as he is eager for highly trained employees to provide the best service to his clients. Some of his staff were sourced from Skills Furniture in Johannesburg and Furntech in Roodepoort.
Senosi was born in Soweto and then in the early years of his life, his family relocated to Vosloorus. Instead of completing his matric, he developed a passion for fashion design and then went to study fashion design at Johannesburg’s SewAfrica Fashion College.
Upon graduating, he made curtains for the hotels. But with the financial difficulties, the fashion business stopped and he went job hunting, “which did not work, and I came back to fashion again”.
Then while he was again supplying curtains to hotels, one of his clients employed him as a handyman in 2010. In 2012 he was promoted to maintenance technician and in 2013 to supervisor. Then the idea of starting his own business kicked in, and he did the alterations to the hotel staff uniforms, using his fashion design background before going into furniture production.
In 2019, he received management training from Tsogo Sun. He believes that fashion design and furniture production are interlinked.
“If you look at the design that we make, especially in our couches, they are not just plain couches. There is an element of fashion to it based on the textile set that we choose and colours that we use,” he said.
Some small black entrepreneurs complained about being sidelined by white clients who prefer to deal with service providers of their own race. “Not in my case, because of how I managed to build the brand with confidence. When it comes to skin colour they (white clients) trust me and most of my clients are white people.
“There is a certain culture of how black business operate, that culture does not work for me, I do things by the book, meaning that I follow all the correct processes, and I find what works for me,” he said.
Government tenders are a “no-no” for Senosi because he says they are linked to the “brown envelope culture”.
“That is what I came across when I attempted to go into that market as I found that people (government officials) want something (kickbacks) from you, which I saw as a bit of a pain for me, and chose not to go for that market,” he said.