Fashion

Local Spotlight: Tlotlego Handcraft

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Ike Lekgoro is a young, dedicated and motivated entrepreneur. A few years back he was selling boerewors to make ends meet but had in mind the dream of owning his own business one day and making a difference in the process. Skip forward to 2020 and Ike is the proud owner of Tlotlego Handcraft, a Limpopo based company producing handcrafted leather shoes and accessories.


Speaking to One Pulse Africa, Ike explained that his journey has not been a smooth one but that he always had a mindset of wanting to touch people’s lives and make a difference in more ways. Ike decided to try his hand at leather crafts and to learn how its done.

He says, “I have never gone to school or college to learn what I know. I never had a mentor or anyone to show me the ropes. But I must say it has not been easy. Leather is expensive, and if you’re learning, you make a lot of mistakes. Mistakes on leather are very costly because you cannot undo what you have done wrong. You need to cut it out or start over.

He now makes hand-crafted shoes, bag, belts, and wallets that are sold via his online store. Ike does most of the sewing as well as the handling and distribution. Production at his workshop in Limpopo had nearly tripled in output capacity, but the pandemic has taken its toll on business. The operations had to stop, and customers generally declined.

He said it is sometimes challenging to compete with large distributors. “I am not looking to distribute my products. I would rather own shops that I supply myself. The problem is that local people do not appreciate handmade products. They want them to be the same price as the products they buy from the shop. They fail to realize that there is a lot of heart, love, effort and precision that a human would put into the product compared to a machine,” he added. 

Ike wishes to see more and more people moving away from mass-produced goods and toward hand-crafted products made by local communities. He said, “It would be great also to see many small businesses provide these handmade products to consumers who are wanting to shake the hand of the person who made it rather than buy from a corporation.”Tlotlego Handcraft was founded with a vision to become a key participant in the economy through employment creation. The company intends to better the lives of the local people who are directly and indirectly involved in its operations.

Tlotlego Handcrafts also started a School Shoes Repair Project in February, as a way of giving back to the community, whereby they went around schools in Limpopo repairing students’ school shoes for free.