Luciano Vandyar

I come from a creative background in advertising, gaining a Diploma in copywriting from the AAA School of Advertising in Cape Town. I spent many years working at a traditional ad agency in mostly ‘BTL’ channels. During this phase at A&J I was responsible for naming the ratings site 'Yowzit!' (www.yowzit.co.za), which now enjoys a global footprint, as well as naming 'East3Route'(east3route.co.za), a development route initiative between South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland, now incorporating Seychelles. Other notable accounts from 2006 to 2012 that I played a key creative part include ... Dube TradePort, The Careways Group, Lafarge Gypsum, Albaraka Bank, Ithala Bank, Trade and Investment KwaZulu-Natal, Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre(ICC), Jumpstart - a Gift of the Givers Entrepreneurial Programme, Sari's for Good Karma, Nedbank Homeloans, Mnet Outside Broadcast, 2010 Premiers Office, Gauteng Shared Service Centre(GSSC), Gauteng Provincial Government(GPG), Xcallibre.com, Jack’s Paint, TCS and Total SA. In 2012 I left agency life to pursue an idea for an energy drink start-up, and it was quite a steep learning curve for two guys who had no clue about the beverage industry. In the end the challenges were far too many to conquer, and we shelved our I idea for another day. In 2014 I co-founded ‘buyMART’, an online store that sold Kitchenwares and Housewares, this venture would have mixed results during its two year run, but it did inspire my next venture. In 2015 I co-founded a kitchenware brand called 'Kitchen Kulture', in collaboration with the brilliant Kamini Pather (2013 MasterChef Winner South Africa). We brought out a debut range of frying pans and a wok that was launched in 2017 in over 127 retail stores across South Africa and into Africa by GAME stores which is part of the MassMart group(now owned by Walmart). Differences in vision saw it become a limited edition series of kitchenware called ‘Kitchen Kulture by Kamini’ with its vast potential remaining untapped. Building the brand of Kitchen Kulture, which saw me naming it, and developing it with a former colleague from advertising sparked an idea for us to launch our own ad agency called ‘VanüKam’. In late 2017, we were asked to pitch on the Embury College 2017/2018 Registration ad campaign. This was the concrete birthing of vanukam.co.za as a boutique ad agency(which consequently won the pitch.) This would lead us to creatively rebranding Embury College as well as their website along with conceptualising two major ad campaigns which included Billboards, Radio Ads, Social Media Videos and Street Pole ads. Embury College was owned by The JSE listed Stadio Group and now goes by the ‘Stadio Multiversity’ brand name. That brings me to ‘Lockdown 2020’, when business was slow, and I happened to order online from one of the traditional big guys through lazy default via persistent ads and mails but mostly due to their quick delivery. And on this occasion, they went amiss, leaving me no recourse or alternative, stretching a normal 3-5 days delivery to 18 days. I had mailed them, took to social media, and was largely ignored. So this got me thinking, maybe I should start a hashtag for people to suggest alternative online shops to buy rather than the usual suspects. And it was in this exercise of coming up with an hashtag, I thought, why not just start with a curated directory of stores other than corps, and build from there. So I self-funded and bootstrapped quickly to my MVP to get the site up and running in its most basic, whilst using my key skills to raise brand awareness via creative social so that people will eventually say, ‘Hey, have you checked on Waar?’. I went with a short and succinct name that is easy to spell and hard to forget so that recall is simple and negates my lack of an app. In a world of SuperApps, crowded marketplaces and monopolized platforms, we want to be a simple ‘go to’ for other than your usual brands or stores.