Promotional clothing and gift supplier Kevro spotted a gap in the South African corporate gift market for environmentally safe products and following extensive research, launched a range of gifts two months ago to reap first-mover advantage.
Its products conform to the most stringent international regulations for harmful chemicals and metals, even though South Africa has no enforceable minimum standards of its own.
The market response to the range has been "fantastic", says Mark Lachman, the managing director of Kevro's gifting division, Barron Gifts, although he is reluctant to disclose sales figures so soon after the launch.
While the inner foil lining of a cooler bag would typically contain 6 000 parts per million (ppm) of lead or cadmium, dangerous levels for the human nervous system, Barron's self-imposed ceiling for all products is 200ppm.
Since its gift range was launched, Kevro has introduced stringent pre-production and post-production tests, having already rejected more than 100 000 units, which are returned to the factories of source (mostly in China).
"It gives our customers an opportunity to go into the market with a unique and differentiated selling proposition," Lachman says. "We are supplying gifting solutions to major companies with triple bottom-line responsibility and corporate social investment initiatives. They don't want kids sucking on the back of a pen with 6 000ppm of lead."
Kevro has absorbed the costs of development "to remain competitive in the market", he notes.
The company is a trade-only supplier of corporate and promotional products, wholesaling rather than selling direct to the public. It describes itself as a small to medium business, whose shareholders are Rael Hodes, Kevin Berkowitz, Steven Isaacson and private equity partner Buffet Investment Services.
The Barron gift range was inspired, says Lachman, both by commercial drive and the personal sustainability beliefs of the shareholders. Until the launch of Barron Gifts, Kevro had focused on the promotional clothing market, supplying items such as branded T-shirts to companies doing promotions.
Since its refocusing as a one-stop solution for the promotional market, the Barron product range has expanded to include 213 gifting items such as writing instruments, folders, notebooks, bags, "anything that can be branded", Lachman says.
For both the clothing and gift ranges, Kevro sources its products from about 70 factories in China - a function "of what's happening globally", says Lachman - as well as some local facilities. The company "doesn't really" get specific requests from South African companies for items made locally, he says.