Yuppiechef co-founder and former CEO Andrew Smith said he struggled with the hardship his business dream caused his family. He told the Suits & Sneakers interview show that he could not afford to take his one-year-old son to a doctor.
The child fell ill while Yuppiechef was still small. The founders did not draw full salaries from the business for five years. Mr Price later paid R402 million for the company.
“What I struggled with is that I chose to be in that position. I could have gone and got a job somewhere. I was definitely employable at that time,” Smith said.
“So, as a small business owner, I chose to take a path which had these knock-on impacts for my family and my kids,” he said. Smith has kept journals since he was 18. He said he saw this struggle when he read them again after selling the business.
Smith grew up in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, and matriculated at Hilton College with seven distinctions in 1998. He then enrolled for a BSc in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. He dropped out three months later.
In his memoir, Handwritten: The founding story of Yuppiechef, he said he wanted practical programming experience and found the lectures too theoretical. He also wrote that he had failed a test for the first time.
“It was right for me to leave university, but I had told myself it was because I was wasting time and accumulating debt,” he wrote.
Smith worked at a company called The Blue Box until 2002, then moved to Cape Town to work in a small web agency. Shane Dryden, who worked in graphic design and marketing, became his next-door neighbour there. Both men wanted to own something that did not depend on selling their time.
In 2005, the two and two others set aside three days to launch an online shop. They chose to sell an electric fly swatter called the Bug Zapper. It went on to sell more than R1 million worth of stock over eight years.
Yuppiechef launched in August 2006 with 32 Cuisipro kitchen products. It ran from Smith’s lounge in Plumstead, Cape Town, and had no credit-card facilities at first. The founders kept doing web development work to pay their bills.
Their first customer from outside their personal networks ordered a cheese grater in November 2006. Dryden added a handwritten thank-you note to the order. That note later became a defining part of the company’s customer service. It took a year to reach the first 200 customers.
In 2008, Smith recruited former classmate Paul Galatis. Galatis recalled that Yuppiechef was handling about five orders a day and could not pay him, so he joined for an equal share of the business.
By January 2011, the company had seven employees. That year, New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management bought a 25% stake. Smith said that, in hindsight, taking the money meant they would have to sell the business one day.
Mr Price announced on 15 March 2021 that it had agreed to buy all of Yuppiechef. The deal took effect on 1 August 2021. Mr Price said in its 2022 annual financial statements that it paid R353 million in cash and R49 million in shares.
Source: this article is based on reporting by MyBroadband. Image: MyBroadband. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Business desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Anelisa Nkuna covers business and money news for Tzaneen Voice. Anelisa reports on the rand, fuel prices, interest rates, jobs, Eskom, Transnet, farming and company results. The aim is simple: explain what the numbers mean for household budgets, small businesses and workers in South Africa.