The
Portfolio

The brief was not design. It was trust across a border.

Afrexpay is a Johannesburg business and financial consulting firm that structures cross-border trade between South Africa, Mozambique and the wider African corridors: trade facilitation, risk management, supply chain coordination, market strategy, and a procurement service that sources goods in South Africa for buyers in Mozambique. We are their agency, and the work runs the full width of it, from positioning through to the bilingual site in English and Portuguese and the digital work around it.

Asking a business in Maputo to commit a procurement budget to a firm on the other side of a border is not a design problem. It is a credibility problem, and credibility is built by what you are willing to state plainly. So the compliance posture, the authorised providers and the risk framing sit on the surface of the brand rather than in the small print, and the procurement service is explained as four steps a buyer can follow without calling anyone. That is the whole argument: make the unfamiliar thing legible, and the transaction stops feeling like a risk.

Nobody notices the air conditioning until the day it fails.

Milestone HVAC Solutions, a division of Milestone Global, installs, maintains and emergency-repairs heating, ventilation and air conditioning for commercial, industrial and residential property across South Africa. We are their agency across the full spectrum, from the brand through the website to the digital marketing that has to put a technical business in front of the people who sign for it.

Nobody buys air conditioning because it is beautiful. A facility manager buys response time, compliance with South African electrical and HVAC standards, and the confidence that a failure at four in the afternoon gets answered. So the brand does not sell comfort, it sells reliability, and the site is arranged the way the buyer actually thinks: installations, preventative maintenance, emergency response, specialised solutions, with compliance given a destination of its own instead of a line in a footer. Selling a technical service means respecting how technically the customer is already thinking.

An online store does not have a traffic problem. It has a shelf problem.

Express Fitness Urban sells home and commercial gym equipment across South Africa, importing award-winning German-engineered ranges and manufacturing its own alongside them, with nationwide delivery and installation inside forty-eight hours. We ran the commercial side of the store: search engine optimisation, e-commerce and search advertising through Google Ads and Amazon Ads, the Google Merchant Center product feed, and a redesign of the pages that were losing the sale after the click.

Selling a treadmill online is not selling a t-shirt. The basket is large, the buyer researches for weeks, and the decision is made on delivery, installation, warranty and whether the thing will still be serviced in three years. So the work was not a campaign sitting on top of a catalogue. It was the feed, the product data, the page that answers the objection, and the search term that catches somebody at the exact moment the comparison is happening - across Google and across the marketplace, because the buyer does not care which of the two you happen to be good at.

A brand that did not have a name yet, taken all the way to shelf.

Awesome Foods arrived as a product without a name, in a market that had never heard of it. We named it. Then we built everything the name needed to survive contact with a shelf - the brand, the identity system, the packaging across the full range, the pack architecture that lets a shopper read the whole range in one glance, the go-to-market strategy, the social channels and the website. A new FMCG entrant in Botswana, standing next to imported brands with decades of spend behind them.

This is the clearest single demonstration of the whole agency in practice. Every one of the four verbs ran on one account, in sequence, for one client - decided, made, placed and measured - rather than four suppliers each holding a piece and nobody holding the argument.

A course is not a product. The platform that sells it, teaches it and certifies it is.

Cabanga Academy is an e-learning platform built around a single flagship qualification, the Cabanga Digital Navigator. We took it from a body of teaching to something a stranger could buy with confidence - the name, the mark, the identity, the positioning against the alternatives already on the market, the enrolment path, and the platform the whole thing runs on. Six modules, twenty-four lessons, twenty assignments and a final examination, delivered end to end online and closing in a three-year certification.

Education is the hardest thing in this portfolio to sell, because it asks for trust before it asks for money. A learner has to believe the certificate will still mean something the day after they pay for it. So none of this work was decoration. It was the honest comparison against the competition, the outcomes of learners who had already come out the other side, a registration and activation sequence that had to work across the continent with nobody standing in the middle of it, and a brand steady enough to put its name on a certificate for three years.

We arrived when there was one thing to sell. There are three now.

Setbooks is a founder-led professional services group in Johannesburg, run by a Fellow Chartered Certified Accountant and built on the promise that one named partner is personally accountable for every engagement. When this relationship began in 2018 the business sold accounting, and only accounting. The same brand today carries three divisions: Accounting Solutions, Secretarial Services, and an accredited Training Academy delivering nationally recognised qualifications and more than seventy short courses.

Growth of that kind is where most brands quietly break. A name built to say “we do your books” will not stretch to say “we register your company and train your staff” without turning into a list. The work was to hold one standard across three very different buyers - the owner who wants their tax handled, the board that needs statutory compliance, and the public-sector training manager buying accredited qualifications - and to keep the founder visible at the centre of all three, because that accountability is the actual product. Eight years in, that is still the argument the brand makes.

The account where we were the client, and could not blame anybody.

In 2017 this agency took on a brief with no budget, no name recognition and no external client to answer to. Build a business media network across Africa, from a single magazine in South Africa, using nothing but the advertising and digital craft on this page. Nine years later that brief is twelve brands circulating in twenty-four countries, with editorial leadership and contributors drawn from twenty-eight.

We put it in the portfolio for one reason, and it is not pride. Every other entry here is a company that hired us and then had to live with the result. This is the one where we hired ourselves, carried the cost, and had nowhere to hide when something did not work. It is the longest-running test of the method we sell, and it is the only account on this page where you can inspect nine years of output in public and judge for yourself.

A worldwide go-to-market, and the product built to carry it.

paaq - please ask any question - operates out of South Africa with headquarters in Ireland and the United States. We were appointed as the agency to build the worldwide go-to-market strategy and then to begin executing it. Two things outlived our tenure: the news platform we architected, live today, and the paaq hub, a technology hub we conceived that the company is still rolling out. This is the same muscle that built our own network. Publishing infrastructure, not a brochure.

A marketplace launched directly into Amazon’s path.

Zandaux is a multi-vendor marketplace competing with Amazon in South Africa. We arrived a few months before Amazon’s local launch and ran the full go-to-market for a year - brand activation across every digital channel, the design work, the launches themselves and everything after them. A digital and a physical launch in South Africa, then physical operations into Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt.

Built in 2022. Still running the sales floor today.

We digitised the sales funnel for a California business and it has been running continuously since 2022. The machine is what made the next territories possible - the company expanded into Florida, with Chicago next. This is the one entry on this page that sits on the other side of the world from everything else, and that is precisely why it is here. The craft travels.

A conglomerate branded from nothing, across three industries.

Redith began in construction, moved into paint manufacturing, then into beauty and hair care with a salon lounge attached. We built the entire brand from scratch and branded every product in the paint range. Not a logo. A complete identity that had to keep holding together as the group diversified into industries that share nothing with each other. This is what we mean when we say a proper brand rather than a mark.

Five brands and a group, held in the air at once.

Money Group runs corporate finance, a bureau de change, short-term lending, a pawn operation and money transfer, out of South Africa, Dubai, Hong Kong and Zambia. We carried the group brand and all five subsidiary brands together for the better part of a year. The search work is what people remember. We locked up the terms that mattered - Forex, bureau de change - territorially, until the group came up first in the region, and a single location image we published passed a million views on Google.

Fourteen years with one client. That is the whole review.

Extreme Camps designs and runs school camps, church retreats, Breede River rafting and corporate team building across the Western Cape. This one started in 2012, taken freelance, years before the agency existed, and it has never once been interrupted. The capacity changed as we grew. The client did not.

It is also the hardest audience on this page to write for, because two people have to be convinced by the same sentence. The fourteen-year-old has to want to go, and the teacher signing the indemnity form has to feel safe letting them. Adventure sells to one and terrifies the other, so the brand carries certified guides, safety and facilitator experience in the same breath as the rapids. Get that balance wrong in either direction and the booking does not happen. Fourteen years of repeat schools is the evidence that it holds.

Seven years live. Never down, never breached.

In 2010 we built the group website and every subsidiary site for one of Zimbabwe’s top three listed financial services groups, then ran their digital marketing for the five years that followed. That infrastructure was not replaced until 2017. Seven years carrying a listed insurer’s public face, without an outage and without a breach. For a business whose failures get reported rather than forgotten, that is the only number worth quoting.

Every international airport in three countries, and the brand had to hold in all of them.

Cafe Espresso is a restaurant chain. At the time we did the work, in 2017, it was trading in the international airports of Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia, and at Victoria Falls. We carried the whole brand: the identity, the website, the menus, the social channels and the printed collateral that ends up on the table in front of a customer.

Airport retail is an unforgiving brief. Your customer is early or late, never on time, carrying luggage, watching a departure board, and reading your menu under pressure in a language that may not be their first. The brand has to be legible in seconds and identical in every terminal, because the same traveller sees it in three countries and expects the same thing each time. That is a discipline problem before it is a design problem, and it is the reason this account still teaches us something.