It All Started With a Lappie — In South Africa
A lot of good stories start in kitchens — and ours began in Cape Town, where I lived from 1994 to 2024.
One day, while wiping kitchen counters, I found myself thinking:
“I miss the cloths that we had back home. Those great cotton cloths that Grandma made. They’d be a great home-based job creation project for mothers and caregivers. I wonder if I can get cotton yarn?”
This is how my ideas usually come — during quiet, everyday moments. And then suddenly, I’m off: sourcing cotton yarn, deciphering my grandmother’s handwritten knitting pattern, finding local knitters, designing packaging… and brainstorming names.
(Nitwit Cloths didn’t land well.)
Eventually, I worked up the courage to sell my not-so-cool kitchen cloths at the very cool City Bowl Market in Cape Town. Markets are great for letting you know what is wrong with your idea.
- Not everyone in South Africa cleans their own kitchen.
- If they do, they don’t need a new cloth every week.
- And “nit” is not a word you want in your brand name.
But markets can also bring even better ideas. After one of my practiced pitches, a potential customer rightly pointed out, “Oh, it’s just a posh lappie!”
A lappie (pronounced luppie) is a South African name for a cloth, taken from the Dutch word for a rag — lap.
And so our cloth got its name: The Posh South African Lappie.
From Lappie to Lifestyle
With a more realistic view of the lappie’s sales potential, I started adding other kitchen textiles to the product offering. I carved my own printing stamps to create a home-friendly textile printing process and was making cute printed tea towels.
Our home in Cape Town became a production space — filled with tea towels, oven mitts, shopping bags, travel pouches, and ginormous striped cushions.
Eventually, I opened a tiny weekend shop from our garage. That’s when the name SpaZa was born — a nod to home-based stores common in South African townships.
In the hopes that my hand-knit cloths would be more popular in North America, we launched our Etsy store in 2012. At the same time, I applied to show at the Design Indaba Expo in 2012. They liked my eco-friendly handmade concept but encouraged a less crafty and more design-forward direction.
The First Public Debut of the Fabric Dish Cover
I’ve never been a fan of plastic wrap — it feels wasteful and makes food sweat. I have always used tea towels to cover dishes before serving, but this solution didn't work if I needed to take a dish to a gathering or keep it in the refrigerator. One day, while wrestling with a tea towel and a piece of elastic, another idea struck!
So the next morning, I started cutting my tea towels into circles and experimenting with elastic.
I brought a few early versions to Design Indaba to test the idea. On the trade-only day, retail buyers weren’t convinced — but as woman who have brought a salad to a barbecue (braai in South Africa) they wanted them!
I stayed up all night making more for the public day.
Petro — who was looking after the children while I was at the show — was conveniently a costume designer and jumped in to help sew, dropping off batches to me through the marshalling yard fence. I took a taxi to the venue so I could continue trimming threads and tying tags along the way.
I hadn’t even set a price when the crowd started shouting out suggestions. Within minutes, I had sold out.
Growing the Brand
From our garage, we grew into a permanent space at The Watershed at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.
Opening that store in 2014 gave us access to international customers and a steady income stream — which meant reliable work for our home-based producers.
We shipped our Etsy orders by post from Cape Town — I will never forget standing in line at the post office, fingers crossed.
After years of refining packaging, creating systems, and building up inventory, SpaZa officially became an international brand in 2018 when we launched a U.S. fulfilment centre in New Jersey.
Return to Canada
Being Canadian, we wanted to give our high school graduating children the experience of living in Canada, so we had planned to move in April 2020. Of course, COVID meant that we had to dash for the last flights leaving South Africa — making our departure and arrival so much more dramatic.
Reflecting on this journey fills me with pride and gratitude. What started with a nostalgic need for a good kitchen cloth grew into a beautiful, purpose-driven business and lifestyle brand that continues today. Thank you to all who have supported us along the way.
And it all started with a lappie!