History of Lavender in Lavender Hill Products

By Marcelle du Plessis, Owner Manager & Founder

 

After studying and graduating from BAS (Bachelor in Architectural Science) at UCT I decided to change my route and move to entrepreneurship. I have always wanted to own my own company. I am an extremely creative person and doing business is an extremely creative process. I completed a post graduate degree in Management in Entrepreneurship at UCT. This, combined with my compassionate heart and creativity, launched me into starting up an NPO called the Lavender Upliftment Trust along with two other trustees. 

I managed this NPO in Lavender Hill for two years. The aim of the NPO was to plant lavender gardens in the community of Lavender Hill for beautification. After a year of running this NPO I started developing the enterprise Lavender in Lavender Hill on the side. Through my experience at the NPO I saw that there were many good people in the community and became aware of their struggles and need for assistance. The concept, at that time, was to use the lavender gardens being planted through the Lavender Upliftment Trust to become urban farms for the production of lavender products - this unfortunately did not work. 

The community did not buy into the lavender garden concept as some gardens were vandalised and as many community members could not afford watering their gardens due to the municipality increasing water rates at that time. Due to lack of funding in the NPO we were unable to continue the gardens. The NPO shut down after two years.

 

I continued with Lavender in Lavender Hill as a company. Today the company produces all natural ingredient lavender home, body and food products. The social aim behind the company is to support entrepreneurial development and job creation in the Lavender Hill community and other Cape Town areas.

 

For this reason we mainly work with community and underprivileged producers, small enterprises, entrepreneurs and companies that support job creation and empowerment. This is visible through our production line where our handmade items are made by Shamielah, Veronica and Janap from Lavender Hill, Lillian from Mitchells Plain and Sharon's team in Observatory. A variety of our products are packaged by ladies from the Vrygrond community and our specialised body range is produced by a young beauty entrepreneur. 

 

To assist the Lavender Hill community members we offer education sessions and donations of plants for personal or small enterprise use. These sessions are held at the New World Foundation in Lavender Hill on request. 

 

We also assist people from the community and surrounding Cape Town areas with business opportunity creation. Lavender Ambassadors can become resellers of our products and in this way take their financial future into their own hands through being entrepreneurs. 

 

The beauty of the Lavender in Lavender Hill products is that they are of extremely high quality with wonderful healing benefits yet they have a social story behind them. This gives you two reasons to purchase.