From Corporate to Manufacturing: Khabo Mnguni Tells the ZS Uniforms Story in Full

There Was No Light Bulb Moment

Asked when she knew it was time to leave, Khabo rejects the premise. There was no single moment. She started her corporate career in 2010 and spent thirteen years there, moving through finance, regulation, project accounting and marketing, and completing four qualifications along the way. She registered the business in 2020, while still employed. In 2021 she was moved back into her old finance role.

What decided it was a comparison, not an epiphany. The business was showing progress. The corporate path had stopped showing any. She handed in her resignation in August 2022, having typed the letter roughly six months earlier.

The Shop Is in Her Grandparents’ Building

Khabo comes from an entrepreneurial family on both sides. Her grandparents built a retail complex in Tembisa in the 1980s. When a space in that building fell vacant, it needed renovation before anything could open in it, and that was one more push toward leaving corporate. The retail store opened in 2022, in the building her grandparents built.

The registered company name pays homage to that family line. It was shortened to ZS Uniforms for a blunt commercial reason: customers could not pronounce the full version, and kept asking what it meant.

Two Sales on Shopify, and What That Taught Her

ZS Uniforms did not start with a shop. It started with an e-commerce store, because there was no money for a brick and mortar space or for the renovation one would need. Khabo built the Shopify store herself. By her own account it produced about two sales.

That failure was informative rather than fatal. Parents wanted to touch the fabric and have their children fitted. The market was telling the business what format it actually wanted, and the answer was a physical store in the township rather than a checkout page. Online ordering is being worked on again now, but with the same test applied first: is this something customers will actually use, or a solution built for the founder’s convenience?

Why the Manufacturing Came In-House

For its first years the retail store relied on third party suppliers, and the failures were the ordinary, reputation-damaging kind: sizing wrong, quality inconsistent, deadlines missed. Winter tracksuits promised to parents for April arrived in July and August. When you have taken a parent’s money for a winter garment, delivering it after winter is not a logistics problem. It is a broken promise.

Making that move required someone who could actually run a factory floor, and ZS Uniforms already had her. Khosi Nkoko, Khabo’s cousin and the COO of ZS Uniforms, is a fashion designer by profession with more than twelve years in the garment industry, specialising in apparel design and production. She spent a decade founding and running her own clothing label, Unbuttond Clothing, before joining the business. Khabo calls bringing her into production a no-brainer, and describes her simply as the heart and the lifeline of the operation.

Production moved in house in December 2024 under Khosi. It began with two seamstresses, one industrial machine and one overlocker, at a point when ZS Uniforms was already supplying roughly ten schools and heading into the January rush: skirts, tunics and golf shirts, all of them needed at once. Capacity was the constraint, and Khabo is candid that this was the hardest part. She also credits the demand that followed to how good Khosi is at the work.

Her framing of it is worth repeating for any business weighing the same move: bringing manufacturing in house is expensive and stressful, and it adds a whole new dynamic to a business. It also hands you control of your quality, your timelines and your margins, and it lets you make your early mistakes at small scale rather than large.

The Gap She Saw, and the One She Did Not Expect

The commercial gap was visible from the start. School uniforms were bought in town, never in the township, and Khabo could not find large scale black female owned school uniform retailers anywhere in that market. The plan was to bring uniforms closer to the community, with quality and proper customer service attached.

The second gap only became visible once she was working in the shop full time. She grew up with working parents and a model C education, and says she did not fully understand, as a child, that other children were not in the same position. Standing behind a counter every day, she started seeing learners arriving in torn uniforms, torn socks and torn shoes, and learners with no jersey at all.

How Threads for iKasi Foundation Started

The response was the Fudumala school jersey drive, run in 2023 as an initiative of ZS Uniforms. It raised funds and delivered 90 jerseys. That was the proof. Threads for iKasi Foundation was registered afterwards, and Tembisa was the obvious first community: it is where Khabo grew up, where the business operates, and the community that supported her grandparents before it supported her.

The work has since travelled. Khabo describes an initiative in the Eastern Cape, taken there with Standard Bank’s transactional banking department, that reached 109 learners across two schools. The deliberate difference in approach is scope: rather than jerseys alone, the Foundation adds full school uniforms and toiletries where it can.

On the Awards, and Not Living in the Trophy Room

Silindo Mabena raises the recognition, and Khabo lays out the run: top 30 in the Hollywood Foundation Bambelela awards in 2023, then a year in which she won the Standard Bank Empower Her competition, placed second in the Regenesys Womenpreneur pitching competition in August, and won the IWISA No. 1 Community Champions award for Gauteng in September 2025.

Her account of what that recognition is for is unusually level-headed. It confirms that people are seeing the work. It changed her own confidence, particularly because she says she was not especially recognised during her corporate career. And then it becomes fuel rather than furniture. In her words, they do not spend a lot of time looking at the trophy room.

She is equally direct about the competitions she has entered and not won, and what that does and does not mean: not making a final does not say the business is failing. What matters is whether you are building something sustainable and growing.