YOUNG PROFESSIONALS
Jermaine Charles making strategic moves Noluvuyo Bacela
Four and a half qualifications later, ZAXL online store founder, Jermaine Charles tells us about his journey, his brand and being a creative entrepreneur. After losing out on a job, a two year wait for a work permit from the Home Affairs department and a trip back from Zimbabwe, he says he started dabbling on the deejaying decks as a means of making money. He also added a teaching job and a Marketing diploma to that which would ultimately change everything. “Deejaying gave me access to street culture and brands. I knew their concerns - how they couldn’t get into stores and so forth so I had an idea to start a pop-up store, incorporating everything I learnt along the way. I founded ZAXL, Mzansi Extra Large which is an online clothing brand.”
why an online clothing brand
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n a nut shell, Zimbabwe- born Marketing Strategist Jermaine Charles describes himself as “a normal guy who just likes starting and finishing things”. He says he spent his Saturdays at the library reading at least ten books on different subjects, and by the time he finished high school he hadn’t a clue of what to study.
from humble beginnings come big things The obvious thing for him was to join his father at his newly opened construction company, so he enrolled for a degree in Civil Engineering which he “hated” so he switched to Fine Art and Design at the Design Technikon in Zimbabwe where he stayed for a year and a half. “I think that’s where the seeds of what I’m doing now
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“I thought I wanted to be an Art Director - I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I knew I was getting closer to realising my passion”
began because we had no computers. We had to do everything by hand, from lettering to developing photographs, and we were always researching,” he says.
things get better with time Things really started to take shape after his family situation turned around financially. This allowed him the opportunity to study in South Africa. He went on to finish his studies in Fine Arts and Architecture at the University of Cape Town in record time, to doing a year at AAA studying Advertising. “I thought I wanted to be an Art Director - I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I knew I was getting closer to realising my passion,” Jermaine says.
The platform was founded to address the difficulty young businesses came up against in the local sphere, and to harness the informal creativity of everyday activities to create an income. In as much as the brand ZAXL was initially meant to be an online store, the small businesses’ strains to meet the required online customer orders caused the platforms to put the online store on hold. “The plan was and still is to gather all the merchandise from these street brands into one place and supply the demand, but these people don’t have access to cash flow, cash reserves and project management skills to run successful businesses. These small businesses don’t have R200 to pay someone to sit and sell their merchandise, transport and iron it,” he says. But what they currently have is a section of the rails at Strato in Long Street. ZAXL has had success at the Toffie Festival and STR.CRD Cape Town this year with over nine pop-up stores showcasing work from Head Honcho, Deep Settle Movement and Butan amongst other brands.
for more information contact: find XAZL Online of Facebook or tweet Jermaine Charles @charlesjaymr