More than half of South Africans are running a side hustle and a growing number of them are women. Many started making something when they had a free moment – at the kitchen table, in the dining room, in the lounge – until they discovered that other people wanted to pay for their creations. This Women’s Month, three of them share what happened between an idea and growing business enterprise.
South Africa, August 2026: Every August, Women’s Month spotlights representation, leadership and workplace recognition. While these are essential topics to maintain diversity momentum in the workplace, there are other stories taking place in spare rooms and kitchen tables across the country – creative endeavours and ideas evolving into side hustles and small businesses powering the country’s economy and inspiring other women to become entrepreneurs.
According to the 2025 Old Mutual Savings and Investment Monitor report, 57% of employed South Africans report having more than one source of income, a figure that rises to 75% among 18 to 29 year olds. A growing number of those businesses are built around making something original, something personalised, something that could not have been bought off a shelf.
The creative economy is driving a meaningful share of that momentum, and the women at the centre of it are building real businesses. Some stumbled in accidentally. Some made a calculated choice to step away from what they had built before. Some are doing it between the school run and bedtime. All of them are doing it on their own terms. And as the State of South African Small Business 2025 report by Xero found, 83% of small businesses grew revenue over the past year, with 90% expressing confidence in their future, which shows that these ideas and dreams are succeeding.
This year, a large share of those makers are women who turned a creative skill into income. Many of them use the same piece of equipment. A Cricut is a compact home machine that cuts and prints designs onto vinyl, card, fabric and sticker paper, controlled through free software called Design Space where users draw their own artwork or start from ready-made templates.
These are three of those women.
Caroline Teixeira, Cricut Ambassador, Workshop Host and Creative Business Owner
Caroline Teixeira bought the entry-level Joy Cricut machine as a birthday gift for her daughter. Within a week she had taught herself to use it, built a detailed miniature caravan and campsite out of card and vinyl, and entered the result in a national craft competition run by the Cricut Family South Africa community. She came second. The woman who won was so impressed that she asked the organisers to send Teixeira her prize as well, a top-of-the-range Cricut Maker 3. A few months later, she applied to become a Cricut Ambassador and in November 2024, that dream came true.
Today she hosts workshops in her home, teaches live crafting classes online, gives demonstrations at craft shows and creates custom gifts, personalised home décor and intricate 3D cardstock projects for clients around the country. She has stepped away from her previous work entirely to pursue the creative business full-time.
“I absolutely love that I can pull out my Cricut at any time and create a beautiful, personalised gift,” she says. “And let’s be honest, the fact that I can make something truly magical at the very last minute before walking out the door is a lifesaver.”
The part she talks about most is teaching. She likes watching someone who walked in nervous make something with her own hands and realise she can do it. “This Women’s Month, I keep thinking about all the women sitting on an idea they haven’t acted on yet,” she says. “You don’t need to be an artist. You don’t need a business plan. You just need to start. Everything else works itself out once you do.”
Zelda Van Den Bergh, Founder, Zoom Creations – Personalised Gifting
Van Den Bergh had a full-time job in logistics when she came across Cricut in 2021. She bought a machine, played with it, and only later started to see money in it. “As my love for Cricut grew and the possibilities became endless, that’s where you start to look and think, there’s something here,” she says. “Something that could help with additional income. And raising kids is not cheap.”
The learning curve was steep. Her first iron-on jobs went badly. She got through three or four T-shirts before she worked out the basics, including the fact that you must mirror a design before you cut it. She kept going anyway and built Zoom Creations, a personalised gifting business she runs from home in the hours after work. Her two daughters help fill orders on weeknights and weekends.
The business has made so much possible for her family. Her eldest daughter earned her South African colours in ringball, and Zoom Creations paid for the tours. Her youngest is training as an athlete. The costs that a salary struggles to cover, the kit, the travel, the fees, come out of gift orders made late at night. “The girls are always coming to me, ‘Mom, we need shirts for our team,'” she says. Now she can say yes.
Five years in, Van Den Bergh still works both jobs, logistics during the day and gifting at night, and she has stopped expecting to feel finished. “I’m five years down and I’m still growing. You never stop learning,” she says. “And the more you learn, the bigger your opportunity becomes.” The reason she does it, she says, is to give her children things she otherwise could not.
Camilla Hyson, Founder, Scribble and Scratch – Online Arts, Crafts and Stationery
Hyson calls herself a serial entrepreneur. She spent ten years running a bakery, grew it, then sold her shares and walked away. The hours were long, the manufacturing side wore her down, and she had a young family. “I just decided to scale it all back down, bring it home, look after the kids and start something much smaller,” she says.
She spent some of the proceeds on a Cricut Maker, the most capable machine in the range, and built her online store around it. Scribble and Scratch sells arts, crafts and stationery, has been trading for two years, and ships to customers from Pietermaritzburg to the Eastern and Western Cape.
The machine runs the practical side of the business. She uses it for packaging stickers, custom labels, QR codes and branded touches that make a small operation look established, without paying an outside printer or waiting on samples. Speed is the reason she rates it. “Running your own business in South Africa is a bit of an extreme sport,” she says. “You don’t have time to run to printers for markups and samples, and we don’t have the budgets to do that. Cricut lets you go to market straight away. You look professional, you don’t look like everybody else, it’s got your own little stamp on it.”
Her advice for anyone stalling is short. “Just go. Get out of your head. Stop wondering whether it’s good enough or pretty enough,” she says. “Get the product out into the world and let people give you feedback because that is the fastest way you can develop that product into something that is selling and worthy and viable.”
The three women have little in common on paper. Teixeira homeschools and teaches, Van Den Bergh works in logistics, Hyson spent a decade in baking. They arrived at the same point from different directions: the things they made for fun started earning real money, and they decided to treat that seriously. None of them wrote a business plan or held a launch. They made something, a customer asked the price, and the orders followed.
“With nearly six in ten South Africans earning additional income through a side hustle, there is a clear opportunity to support a growing community of creators and entrepreneurs,” says Martin Kruger, Cricut South Africa director of sales and marketing. “Access to the right tools can make a meaningful difference in helping people turn ideas into income, and the Cricut products are designed with that in mind.”
