Abelanani
Banner in Durban

Abelanani is a family owned business.
Our name means “let us all share together” and in keeping with that we presently employ 86 staff.
Our lead times are some of the best in the industry and we have recently started a 24 hour branding service as well.

But they wanted to be sure that they were buying a quality product, in a safe shopping environment, without local labour being exploited. Armed with this insight, a 20 square metre office space and a credit card, Salosh and Praveen launched an on-line shopping portal for South African artists, crafters and community outreach programmes as its suppliers. With a growing on-line presence and a loyal base of local retail customers, Abelanani was invited in 2002 to exhibit at the prestigious international retail fair, the Foire de Paris in Paris. While researching the South African market Abelanani started to get orders from local companies who wanted to support local initiatives for their corporate gifts. Looking at the suppliers in the promotional product industry, the partners realised that there was a niche in the corporate gifting sector for locally manufactured products. A craft promotional gift range was created and Abelanani chose Markex to launch it products. The first exhibition was an eye opener and the entrepreneurs decided that they had to broaden their product range if the company was to grow in this market. Serving both the end-user and resellers, the company first started buying from local importers of promotional items. By this time, the interest in South African craft by local companies was starting to wane. Abelanani then increased its import range to stay competitive with other suppliers. Effort was put into understanding what promotional products could be manufactured locally and a manufacturing arm to the business was established to make lanyards. Abelanani delivered a quality product on time, and in the process learnt invaluable lessons about production, work flow and consumables. The company grew overnight from two employees to 20 employees. This learning enabled it to roll out more manufacturing divisions and double its growth on a year to year basis. The decision by Praveen and Salosh to change from supplying both resellers and end-users to a trade only company added to the positive growth curve Abelanani was experiencing. Although the company has grown faster than the systems put in place to deal with growth, new initiatives in the coming months will solve many of the challenges it still faces. Manufacturing promotional products has positioned Abelanani uniquely in the promotional gifts industry. It manufactures bags; office and stationery products, water bottles and cups, notebooks, folders, foam products and name badges. It is the only company that imports, manufactures, brands and moulds its own plastic range of products in the South African promotional product industry. Abelanani offers a spectrum of branding options: heat transfer, pad print, screen print, laser engraving, digital print, dye sublimation, doming, digital transfer and digital litho printing, and is a leader in the field of full colour branding in South Africa. Abelanani has perfected the production process of variable data printing (personalising each item) and can offer this type of branding on all products with full colour branding. The ethos of the company is being upheld by continually training unemployed people and skilling them in the manufacturing process. We believe we can offer our clients a quicker solution, better prices and some protection to the volatile rand dollar exchange rate. So expect more innovative, value for money, quality driven products from us.