New local brand to grace Miss Tourism 2013

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A good brand’s role is to elicit a preference and command a willingness by the target market to pay a premium to own it. When a list is made of the strongest clothing brands locally, a few names regularly surface even though many brands have been crafted in the past years and failed to maintain relevancy. BlueCard is a new local brand founded r by Lesedi Mmopi and Bonginkosi Gwatiwa, focusing on producing an urban headgear line that is to be showcased at this year’s Miss Tourism.

 

Speaking to Time Out, the Sales and Marketing team of Letotile Mmopi and Nkosinathi Gwatiwa xplained that the name BlueCard basically meant one’s identity card (Omang). The blue comes from the colour of the Omang therefore BlueCard epitomizes a proud Motswana. So the target market of the brand “is every Motswana proud of their country and of who they are as Batswana”. The brand is also targeting anybody who has visited or heard of Botswana and wants to be part of the BlueCard movement.

 

When asked how the brand will maintain the aura of an interesting and compelling story Mmopi said that they conducted market research for their brand to get people’s preferences as well as establish competitors’ weakest links. “What we found out is that most local brands focus of T-shirts; therefore our focus was shifted to producing a headgear line as we specialise in snapback caps, baseball caps, sporties, floppy hats, scarves, sun hats and beanies, just to mention a few. We believe our strategy is strong and should work well for us because we are the first local brand to focus on headgear,” Mmopi said.

 

BlueCard is set to feature in the swimwear and casual wear of the Miss Tourism pageant, as they would be providing summer hats, scarves and caps. The headgear collection will also be distributed for the beauty queens to don w. BlueCard is looking to expand its distribution as it is currently in Gaborone, Lobatse and Palapye.