Amazi Connect Unlocks Growth for Local Health & Beauty Entrepreneurs

AMAZI Connect, launching with an event  in Cape Town and in Johannesburg, is a new platform built to address the barriers to growth that health and beauty SMMEs face, enabling them to scale sustainably. The launch events will follow a deliberate journey of Connect, Learn and Unlock, offering entrepreneurs expert insight, solutions and direction, while demonstrating that competition and collaboration can coexist in any industry.

As a social impact beauty brand that facilitates skills development as a route to financial independence for women, AMAZI has identified that success and growth are not only reliant on ambition, capital or marketing. And, the challenges faced by entrepreneurs are often attributed to systems that are not able to scale, lack of trained staff, or an inability to meet the operational demands that consume valuable time, limiting the opportunities to generate additional revenue.

Shaped by what its founders, Divya Vasant and Sekela Lisa Mgcotyelwa, have learnt while building their own business over the past decade, where over 3,000 women have graduated through AMAZI, accounting for a large portion of the existing nail technicians employed in South Africa, AMAZI Connect will provide the resources and support the founders have developed on their journey.

“When the everyday barriers to running a business become easier to manage, entrepreneurs have more capacity to focus on growth. For an industry that provides a route to income, entrepreneurship and ownership for thousands of women, that growth has the potential to extend beyond individual businesses,” says Divya Vasant, co-founder of AMAZI.

Though these solutions clearly focus on the health and beauty industry, they are certainly not unique to it, and remain applicable to restaurants, creative agencies, retail businesses and professional service, and are:

1. Take the Pressure Out of Everyday Supply

The everyday work of sourcing professional products and essentials can create an overlooked operational burden for smaller businesses. Finding products, comparing suppliers, travelling to purchase stock and managing multiple treatment essentials costs owners both time and money, including the very real cost of transport and fuel.

AMAZI Connect introduces customised ready-to-use Professional Treatment Kits designed to simplify this process for entrepreneurs in beauty. By bringing treatment essentials together into practical solutions, the kits aim to reduce the time, cost and operational stress associated with everyday procurement while helping businesses deliver greater consistency across treatments. For owners, that means less time sourcing what they need to operate and more time focused on customers and the business itself.

2. Find and Build the Talent You Need

For service-based businesses, growth depends heavily on having the right people with the right skills. AMAZI Connect provides beauty entrepreneurs with access to skilled talent alongside targeted upskilling opportunities for existing employees.

This is designed to help businesses strengthen their teams, develop existing talent and build the capacity needed to take on more customers or prepare for peak trading periods. For entrepreneurs, talent development therefore becomes more than filling a vacancy. It becomes part of building a business that has the capacity to grow, with staff who are trained to cater to the evolving demands of the modern customer.

3. Make Running the Business Easier

Beauty businesses, for example, often rely on separate systems to manage different parts of their operations. Bookings, customer information, stock and staff commissions on different spreadsheets and systems, while payments operate independently from all of them.

Through AMAZI Connect, entrepreneurs receive first access to Shiio, a business management platform built specifically for these operators. The platform brings bookings, customer information, inventory, staff, commissions, payments and business insights into one connected system.

The proposition is not simply another point-of-sale solution. It is about connecting the different parts of a beauty business so owners have greater visibility and can spend less time moving between disconnected systems.

4. Create More Ways to Earn

Growth is not only about serving more customers. It can also come from increasing the value a business is able to generate from every customer relationship. Through AMAZI Beauty products, merchants will have access to locally made products that can be incorporated into professional treatments and/or sold directly to customers. This gives beauty entrepreneurs access to quality locally made product while creating an additional potential revenue stream beyond their core service offering.

Instead of viewing retail simply as wholesale product sitting on a shelf, the opportunity is to help businesses diversify how they earn and build additional revenue into their existing customer experience. Growth should not happen in isolation

Underpinning the four solutions is a broader idea that entrepreneurs operating in the same industry can compete for customers while still collaborating on solutions to address the challenges they share.