Parys white-water enthusiast Celliers Kruger has designed, built and is now exporting hundreds of plastic kayaks, effectively becoming the newest arrival in SA's innovative boat-building industry.
He is a mechanical engineer who qualified at Potchefstroom University in 1996. His first venture was to write and self-publish a book about paddling in SA that became a best-seller.
Profits were ploughed back into what he saw was needed locally and abroad - a highly manoeuvrable kayak for "playboating" (freestyle stunts) and downriver tripping.
Kruger didn't just design the kayak, called the Flirt. He tooled up the roto-moulding process too, developing his own plastics oven to turn out the 2 m polyethylene boats. Plastics industry experts doubted he could do it. The innovative oven has saved thousands of rand in moulding costs, while allowing Kruger to fine-tune production with critical temperature controls for stiffer or more flexible hulls.
The Potchefstroom district may seem an unlikely place to launch a boat-building enterprise. Yet here the Vaal River offers some of the most reliable stretches of white water in the country, thanks to water-transfer schemes from KwaZulu Natal and Lesotho.
At the Fluid Kayaks factory in Parys, Kruger has created 14 jobs since the inception of the project in 2002. This is welcome news for a town whose one major industrial enterprise, the Arwa stockings factory, closed more than a decade ago.
Kruger has a sound sense of how to finance an enterprise and use available resources. Last year he obtained a small but significant grant of R60 000 from the department of trade & industry to attend one of the top outdoor retail shows in the world, at Salt Lake City, and this year he is hoping to go again.
The exposure and later marketing brought in orders from the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, yielding a turnover of R2m in the first year of trading.
