From Patent to Production: What Kuluhlaza Trading Shows About the Cost of Scaling
Sekelo Shude is past the idea stage.
Kuluhlaza Trading, the KwaZulu-Natal business he founded to turn plastic waste into paving bricks, has a working product, a South African patent and early customers willing to buy. What it does not yet have is enough production capacity.
The business is still young. It produces around 1,000 bricks a day, employs five people and is at the point where demand has to be matched with the right funding, equipment and partners.
For South African business owners, that is where the useful lesson sits. Protecting an idea is one thing. Financing the machinery, working capital and production systems to scale it is another.
The idea came before the funding
The idea began with a memory from childhood: household waste being burned, and melted plastic hardening into something solid enough to play with.
Years later, as a second-year student at the Durban University of Technology, Sekelo returned to that memory with a business question: could plastic be melted down, mixed with sand and moulded into a paving brick?
He was told, in his words, that “it can’t be done”.
Over the next school holiday, he went home, bought oxide for colouring and asked a friend with welding skills to help him build a small steel mould. He returned with a working prototype.
That changed the conversation. The university backed the idea with development funding, and Sekelo kept refining the product: a brick made largely from recycled plastic, sand and oxide, with no cement.
Just before he graduated, formal university support ended. He then turned to the Moses Kotane Institute, a KwaZulu-Natal research and innovation body that runs an annual call for entrepreneurs seeking to protect their intellectual property.
Through that programme, Kuluhlaza Trading secured a South African patent for its manufacturing process in 2023.
A patent is not a business plan
The patent matters. It protects the process Sekelo spent years developing.
But he is clear that it did not suddenly turn the idea into a fully operational manufacturing business.
“Patenting doesn’t mean the business is successful,” he says. “You’ve protected it. Now you need to produce and scale it.”
Kuluhlaza Trading started selling its first bricks about two years ago, funded mostly by prize money from pitching competitions and exhibitions. That money helped buy a small manufacturing machine.
Today, production happens from a home-based site near Port Shepstone, with an incubation office at Oslo Beach for meetings. The business sells bricks to local households and hardware stores that resell them.
It has also built relationships that matter for a business working with waste. More than 50 informal recyclers sell plastic to Kuluhlaza Trading, and the business has a working relationship with the local municipality and access to a nearby landfill site for reclaimed material.
All of that has helped Sekelo get the business going. But it has not yet solved the bigger question: how to produce enough bricks, consistently enough, to meet the demand he is seeing.
The problem is capacity
Ask Sekelo what the business needs most now, and the answer is immediate: capital, and the right partners.
“It’s very sad when people come and they’re looking into buying the product, and they find we don’t have enough capacity to produce,” he says. “We cannot supply them.”
As he sees it, the issue is not whether people are interested in the product. The issue is whether the business can make enough bricks, consistently enough, to meet that interest.
Hardware stores are willing to stock the product. Households like that the brick looks and feels familiar, even though it is made with plastic waste instead of cement. That has become part of how Sekelo thinks about selling it: customers need to understand the innovation, but they also need a product they can trust.
For now, the constraint is one machine, limited production capacity and not enough working capital to add more equipment.
It is a common stage in manufacturing businesses. Proving that a product works is one challenge. Proving that the business can make enough of it, at the right quality and price, is another.
For Kuluhlaza Trading, the next phase depends on funding and operational capacity: more equipment, more reliable production and the ability to supply larger orders when they come.
Letting others in earlier
Sekelo is open about one thing he would do differently.
For a long time, he held the business very close. It was, as he puts it, his baby. Looking back, he believes bringing in the right partners earlier may have helped the business move faster.
“If I’d been open to partners earlier, we would be far ahead by now,” he says. “I was so close to the idea that I didn’t want to let go of it. I think that was the mistake.”
That is a difficult lesson for many founders, especially those who have built something from scratch. Protecting an idea matters. So does knowing when protection starts slowing the business down.
For Sekelo, the patent helped protect the technology. But growing the business requires more than protection. It requires equipment, people, systems, working capital and customers who can order at scale.
That is a different kind of work from invention.
What business owners can take from it
Kuluhlaza Trading is still building. Sekelo is the first to admit the business is not yet where he wants it to be.
That is what makes the story useful. It shows a stage many businesses reach quietly: the point where there is evidence that the product can work, but not yet enough capacity to meet the opportunity.
For business owners assessing their own growth plans, the question is worth asking clearly: is growth being held back by demand, or by capacity?
A demand problem means the market still needs convincing. A capacity problem means the market may already be there, but the business cannot yet supply it properly. The fixes are not the same.
Kuluhlaza Trading has built a working product, found early customers, protected its manufacturing process and created a small recycling supply network. Its next challenge is to turn those pieces into a business that can produce consistently at a larger scale.
At Genfin, we work with established South African businesses thinking through exactly these kinds of growth decisions: when to invest, what capacity will unlock, and whether the numbers can support the next step. If your business has demand but needs funding to meet it, we would like to hear from you.
Ready to review your options?
The simplest way to know how much you can borrow is to check. Apply online with Genfin for a decision in as little as 24 hours, or call 0800 436 346 to talk through your options.