The New Mungo Mill

If you have been to Plettenberg Bay recently you may or may not have noticed that we are digging a hole in the ground of Old Nick Village. It’s been going on for a while now and has been leading up to the fulfillment of a greater plan and vision, and that of a much bigger hole.

We are building what we are calling the Mungo Mill, a working weaving museum that will open to the public in order to showcase the age old art of weaving, from pre industrial-revolution to present day.

But it’s not just a museum. It’s the thriving hub of production that drives our small, resilient and fast growing textile company called Mungo. Producing top quality natural fibre homeware textiles that we sell both locally and internationally. Our present footprint includes retail outlets in Plett, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Mungo also supplies many of the finest South African boutique retailers as well as attending international trade shows in New York and Paris. We now supply shops on 6 of the 7 continents, all shipping from Plettenberg Bay.

Mungo’s mission is to provide a good quality product that is valued by the end user at the same time as providing employment and skills development to the local community. This is something we strive to do in a non-industrial environment.

We hope to help shape and uphold the standards of sustainable production. We challenge the idea that value is a product of price. We don’t compromise on production methods or cost of raw materials when it comes to producing a quality product. We believe strongly that what we create and the manner in which we create it will filter down to the end user and help to improve the world we live in.

Through industrialization we have lost touch with the process of how the goods we use are made. At Mungo we believe that with a policy of total transparency, in addition to the experience of visiting our manufacturing facility, and with the use of our products we can start to regain a connection with how our world works. This is part of our sustainability, transparency and traceability objective, if people can understand where something comes from or how it is made they will value it more, and in turn this can help to curb the blind consumerist attitude that is negatively affecting our planet.

We are essentially proponents of the slow movement, slow food, slow beer, slow textiles.

“Not everyone understands the value of quality. Most have fallen for the lower price, better value pitch. More and more people are coming to understand the value of products made on a small scale with quality in mind, products that have a story with real human beings behind them, beautiful, flawed, real, majestic and interesting human beings. Not a corporate face and a huge marketing budget to sell the illusion of perfection, or the illusion of imperfection, or the illusion of wholesomeness, or whatever the latest fashion”

We believe that good quality with a conscience never goes out of fashion.

It would seem that along with the physical hole that we are digging there comes a philosophical one. Once we have fulfilled this vision we will have nowhere to hide, we will have to live by these words and our dream and you are all welcome to come and be part of the journey. See you at the opening!