Jannie Schoeman was a professional rugby player, Afrikaans, with a conventional Afrikaner upbringing: “You go to the army, you have to be tough, you have to play rugby, you may not cry, and you don’t think outside the box,” he says. He worked at his family’s business, a fuel station in Umbilo, Durban, and his wife, Elize, worked as a fashion designer and seamstress who made wedding dresses, among others. Then, in 1999, fate struck. In the third armed robbery at the fuel station, Jannie’s father was shot and killed. They’d had enough.
They moved to Umhlanga, where they turned Jannie’s mother’s house into a guesthouse. In those years, toiletries for the hospitality industry were not readily available, so Jannie and Elize put their heads together and began to make…
