Ayanda Thabethe’s recipe for success is one to savour

I meet Ayanda Thabethe at the @Sandton Hotel. We rapidly realise as we are led through the light, modern space that we could move in and literally never leave.

It is like a glorified clubhouse with a hotel and long-term apartment rentals in the heart of high-rise central.  

Ayanda’s six-month-old son could go to nursery, and  the two of us could shoot the breeze on the fantastic deck, dipping our toes in the pool.

We could store our wine collection in the  glorious hi-tech wine store for tenants, smoke cigars in the lounge, take meetings in the copious meeting rooms and satisfy our taste buds with  lunch and dinner which is abundant and delicious in the various restaurants.

Then we could work off the copious lunch we are now eating —  huge portions of clever contemporary sushi, steak and salmon — at the Pilates studio, shop in the deli and go to the doctors' rooms if we felt poorly after so much rest and relaxation.  

After a few years of this high life we could have plastic surgery once gravity took hold. Like I said, we need never leave. It is something to behold.

We discuss the business model and we can because Ayanda is completing her MBA at Monash University. In fact, she has an assignment to deliver after lunch.  And Ayanda knows a thing or two about business and brand building.  As she says, she applied some serious knowledge and experience to her own brand, which is a cool 2-million followers strong on the Gram.   

If you haven’t seen Ayanda on TV, you have not been watching  for seven years.  She has been everywhere. It’s not like this powerhouse to rest on her laurels, she had a finance assignment due on the day after she gave birth, and  delivered.  

So with one of her four sisters, the immensely talented makeup artist Lungile Thabethe, they recently launched a makeup brand, Quick Face, with strategic partners Mr Price, and basically sold out.

I am impressed — not because she looks flawless in her perfect white shirt and Gucci trackpants ensemble and I want to get my hands on her makeup and her kit — but because she is, to use the popular parlance, serving. 

“I  don’t want to be on TV forever. I love TV and I have had the pleasure and the privilege of sharing my passion with many people but my ultimate goal is to venture into business and to just have more time with my family.”

She is planning more children with her Mozambican partner and more expansion for the fledgling beauty house. 

“We own the makeup brand with my sister, we would like to see that going international. So my ultimate aim is to have a big international business. Before this I was a brand manager for L'Oréal and Johnson & Johnson. I studied marketing at Tukkies after matric. I always had a side hustle.”

Connie Ferguson gave Ayanda her first big break on TV, but acting was not for her. “It’s just not me to immerse myself in someone else’s character.”  

I wonder if she has become more private as she has grown in the industry. “Yes I just think the more you grow up the less need you have to share and the more you realise the bad things of the world, you wonder why you shared so much.”

So she is not sharing her child’s face on social media. “I imagined somebody writing a bad article about me, or bad comments on social media and attaching my child’s name to it. So I wanted his identity to be completely detached from mine. I will share his milestones but never his face.

She is considered in all her endeavours especially when it comes to owning her intellectual property.

“Long gone are the days where we are just content to be the faces of brands. I think the new crop of celebrities is well acquainted with the fact that they can be business minds and that you need to be an active partner.  It creates more of a person who has a vested interest in the outcome of the business. And you are going to try even harder because you know you are working for yourself.”  

If she had to give her younger self any advice it would be to trust herself more: “To believe more in my capabilities, and trust my dope. Because I needed outside sources for validation and I think I could have had more of that within myself.”

I wonder how you cultivate that self-belief, especially for young women in a skewed societal context.

“I think it's  important to look at the track record of the things you do.  I think we tend to achieve so much but we forget. We forget [you are]  the person who achieved that, it didn’t happen by chance. It happened because you were good at whatever you did, you applied yourself. And so when you are looking for strength for the next thing, you need to look to yourself. I am still ambitious.”