ROMA-ACTUALLY, it is not a shoe polish, it is a shoe cream.
If you happen to sell bananas — good for you — you may have twice the profit because you can now sell the banana flesh for food, and the banana peels for the shoe cream.
Nothing is lost.
That is thanks to the twosome developers, Joalane Josphine (JoJo) Mohale and Qenase Nkoale, both of whom are stationed at the National University of Lesotho (NUL) Innovation Hub.
The shoe cream which has a good name — JoJo shoe cream — has received positive marks from those who have tried it on their shoes.
“It doesn’t attract dust, it lasts long and it softens the skin of my shoes,” commented one Innovation Hub enthusiast who has already tried the polish on his good shoes.
“Plus my shoes are now super-shiny when they have been dabbed with that polish (ha li tšasitsoe ka eo poleche)”.
It has many benefits over your common shoe polishes.
The most important of such benefits is cost.
Now that Covid-19 has wiped out economies off the map, no one wants to buy expensive things these days.
“We have designed the cream such that it has plenty of water which replaced lots of expensive oils used in regular polishes,” Mohale said.
“That has lowered the price of our shoe cream,” she said.
In fact, the mushrooming cost of shoe polishes (packaged in the ever decreasing container sizes) is what encouraged JoJo and her friend to find an alternative in the first place.
But why do they call it a shoe cream?
Well, because, unlike your usual run-of-the-mill shoe polishes which form a rather solid mixture, “our polish is very creamy, hence why we even package it in cream containers,” the passionate women said about their product.
That creaminess is not for nothing.
When you apply a creamy substance to your shoe, you use a lot less material than when you apply that hard solid polish.
In other words, you cover a lot of area on your shoe with a very small amount of the ointment.
Which means you have a double benefit—working with a low cost product and using a little of it to achieve better results.
How better can it get when it comes to saving your pocket!
But your pocket is not the only thing the pair is worried about.
A good polish must leave your shoe skins super-soft — if your shoe skin is soft, it is hard to tear it down.
But that is extremely difficult to achieve.
“Hence why our shoe cream is made from banana peels,” JoJo said.
No kidding!
It turns out banana peels are very rich in potassium.
You may not believe us but if you dry a banana peel in air, you end up with 40 percent potassium on the other side.
Why is potassium so important?
Let’s recall that your shoe is likely to be made of animal skins.
Potassium is an element that makes it easy is for skin to hold moisture well, softening it.
Even your own skin needs potassium too (but don’t worry about eating banana peels, it turns out the banana flesh is also rich in potassium).
As a bonus, it is alleged that the high content of potassium is what makes your shoes super-shiny.
So how did the whole thing come about?
Mohale said she has a client in another of her businesses “who said to me jokingly, “you guys don’t even know that bananas are good for polish?””
No matter how hard she tried to ignore that statement, it kept popping up in her mind.
That is until “I began making my own research which was followed by laboratory trials.”
She kept testing and researching until she got it.
“At first we made a product that looked good but attracted a lot of dust. We kept improving until we had a high water content product that, nevertheless, attracted little dust. At this point, we are now ready to start selling the product.”
Now imagine a situation where banana peels are no longer a waste anymore.
Yet banana peels are not the only would-be waste in this cream for that matter, “we also make a generous use of beeswax from producers of honey who would otherwise throw it off as waste.”
Mohale, the main brains behind this project, said he fell in love with business while he was still a nutrition student at the NUL.
“We took a course in product development and the lecturer who taught the course used to tell us, “every-time you go buy something in a shop, ask yourself, can we find a way to produce this thing right here in Lesotho?””
That thinking resonated with her because, in her own words, “I’ve always wondered why everything has to be made for us.”
We, too, have wondered!
Own Correspondent