The standout name in stainless steel jewellery in South Africa is Purple Carrot, founded by Alita du Plessis and based in Pretoria. It makes hypoallergenic, nickel-free, personalised stainless steel jewellery, plus leather goods, and sells direct to consumer through its own Shopify store at purple-carrot.co.za. Alita built it by accident: a nickel allergy meant she could only wear stainless steel, she could not find stylish stainless steel jewellery in South Africa, so she designed her own. The factory threw in the leftover 99 rings from the batch, and a business was born. She grew it by solving a real problem, going online early, obsessing over customer experience, and refusing to compete on price with Shein and Temu. Here is the full Purple Carrot story, plus exactly what your store can steal. From V8 Media, the team behind R2+ billion in client sales since 2018.
Who is behind Purple Carrot?
Purple Carrot was founded by Alita du Plessis, and it is run out of Pretoria.
She is not a jeweller by training. She is a problem solver who happened to have a problem nobody in South Africa was fixing.
She had a nickel allergy. Traditional metals irritated her skin, including her own wedding ring.
Stainless steel was the only metal she could wear without a reaction. But finding stylish stainless steel jewellery here? Forget it.
So she made her own. That is the whole origin in one line.
Here are the fast facts before we get into how she grew it.
| Purple Carrot | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founder | Alita du Plessis |
| Based | Pretoria, South Africa (factory store in Kilner Park) |
| What it is | Hypoallergenic, nickel-free stainless steel jewellery brand |
| Products | Necklaces, pendants, bracelets, bangles, earrings, rings, personalised pieces, plus leather goods |
| Store platform | Shopify (purple-carrot.co.za), moved up from Wix |
| Origin | A nickel allergy plus 99 leftover rings from a production batch |
| Edge | Personalised, locally backed experience versus mass importers like Shein and Temu |
Sources: Purple Carrot "About Us" page (founder, Pretoria base, hypoallergenic nickel-free stainless steel, product range); Purple Carrot Facebook (Pretoria); the rest of the operating story comes from the V8 Media interview with Alita.
So why does a jewellery brand matter to you if you sell biltong or skincare? Because the playbook is the same.
Solve a real problem. Go online early. Make it personal. Protect your margin. Know your numbers.
How did Purple Carrot start? A wedding ring and 99 spare rings
Purple Carrot did not start with a business plan. It started with itchy skin.
Alita could not wear her wedding ring. The nickel in it set off an allergic reaction.
That is a small, painful, personal problem. The kind most people just live with.
She did not. She designed a ring in stainless steel and sent it overseas to be made.
Then came the accident. Just before shipping, the manufacturer offered her the leftover 99 rings from the production batch.
She thought, why not. Suddenly she had 99 rings to sell and no business to sell them through.
So she built one. Purple Carrot was born completely by accident, per the V8 Media interview.
This is the bit most people miss. She did not wait for a perfect idea. She solved her own problem, then noticed thousands of women had the same one.
The takeaway is blunt. Your next product might be the thing that already annoys you every single day.
What is Purple Carrot's "why"?
We asked Alita why she kept going past those first 99 rings.
Her answer was simple. She wanted to solve problems. Not just hers. Everyone's.
Plenty of women cannot wear normal jewellery. Nickel wrecks their skin too.
Nickel allergy is the most common contact allergy, affecting an estimated 10 to 20% of people, per the American Academy of Dermatology. So this was never a niche of one.
Helping those women became the mission. That is what turned a batch of spare rings into a brand.
Most brands never figure this out. They chase customers but cannot say why they exist.
Alita knew from day one who Purple Carrot was for. The brands that survive always do.
Purple Carrot is for the person who got told "just deal with the rash". That clarity shows up in every product.
The lesson for your store. Features tell people what it does. Your why tells them why it exists. The second one builds a brand.
How did Alita crack the early days of ecommerce?
Rewind to around 2016. Ecommerce in South Africa was still finding its feet.
Alita built her first website on Wix. Not perfect. But it did the job and got her selling.
As the orders grew, Wix started to creak. So she moved up to Shopify, which gave her room to scale.
Then came the moment every small business owner will recognise.
She clicked the "Boost" button on a Facebook post. No idea what it actually did. She just clicked it.
Sales jumped. That surprise lit a fire under her.
So she went and learned. She took courses. She dug into Facebook ads and online marketing properly.
Here is the catch most owners never learn. The Boost button is the training-wheels version of paid ads.
It is fine for a first taste. But the real control, targeting, and reporting live in the proper ads platform, which is the whole point of Ads Manager versus the Boost Post button.
That early willingness to learn paid off later. It is also exactly why we run Meta Ads properly for clients instead of boosting and hoping.
The takeaway. Do not be scared of the tools. The button that confuses you today could be your growth engine tomorrow.
How did Purple Carrot survive COVID when others closed?
Alita did not only run Purple Carrot. She also had an events company. Nineteen years of it.
Then COVID hit. The events business shut down. Gone overnight, like most of that industry in 2020.
But Purple Carrot did the opposite. It thrived.
Everyone was stuck at home, shopping online. A brand that already lived online was in exactly the right place.
That is not luck. That is the payoff of going online early, back when it felt optional.
The owners who had built a real online store kept selling. The ones who relied only on foot traffic went quiet.
The lesson is uncomfortable but true. The work you do before the storm is what carries you through it.
Your website is not a brochure. In 2020 it was the difference between open and closed.
How does Purple Carrot compete with Shein and Temu?
Here is where most local brands panic. Shein and Temu landed and undercut everyone on price.
Cheap jewellery, shipped from overseas, dirt cheap. How does a Pretoria brand fight that?
Alita's answer. You do not fight it. You refuse to play that game.
She saw the giants as a reason to innovate, not a threat to fear.
So she leaned into everything they cannot do. A personal experience. Local craftsmanship. Jewellery you actually design yourself.
She even expanded the range by acquiring a leather company, adding personalised wallets, handbags, and gifts.
A race to the bottom on price has only one prize. A smaller margin and a customer who leaves the second someone is cheaper.
| Shein / Temu | Purple Carrot | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it is made | Mass overseas factories | Designed and personalised in South Africa |
| Price | Rock bottom | Premium, justified by quality and meaning |
| Product | Generic, off-the-shelf | Personalised, design-your-own pieces |
| Skin | Mixed metals, allergy risk | Hypoallergenic, nickel-free stainless steel |
| Service | None, you are an order number | Personal, with after-sales help |
| Buyer feeling | "It was cheap" | "This was made for me" |
You do not beat the giant by being a cheaper giant. You beat it by being the thing the giant can never be.
Local. Personal. On your side after the sale. That is a moat Shein cannot ship.
How does Purple Carrot keep customers coming back?
Alita is obsessed with customer experience. Not the poster on the wall version. The real version.
Her team makes a point of connecting with customers personally.
They even share customer stories in team meetings. So everyone remembers there is a real person behind every order.
The staff do not see themselves as employees. They see themselves as a family trying to bring people joy.
It is not fluffy. A personal touch costs nothing and makes you impossible to copy.
Quality backs it up. Purple Carrot does not pick from a catalogue. They give their own design specs to manufacturers.
They stand behind the product too. Purple Carrot offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus after-sales help that, per the V8 Media interview, often runs well past the sale.
Standing behind your product builds trust. Trust builds repeat buyers, which is the cheapest growth there is, as we cover in what drives repeat purchases.
If you want the bigger picture on this, we wrote the whole case in the importance of ecommerce customer support.
Why does Alita obsess over the numbers?
Alita said one line that could have come straight out of our office. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity.
She watches her numbers. Expenses. Margins. What it actually cost to make R1. That is it.
That awareness lets her adjust pricing and negotiate harder with suppliers.
Most small business owners never do this. They chase the big revenue figure and ignore what is left after costs.
Then they wonder why a "good month" left no cash in the bank.
R1 million in sales feels great. But if it cost R950,000 to make, you ran a charity, not a business.
Knowing your real margin is the difference between a brand that scales and one that just gets busier and broker.
This is the drum we bang constantly, which is why we wrote the most important numbers to track in your business.
How did Alita build the team and culture?
Alita knows the product is only as good as the people behind it. So she is slow to hire.
She hires for personality and cultural fit first. Skills second.
They even use personality tests in hiring to make sure the team actually fits together.
You can teach someone to pack an order. You cannot teach someone to care.
She also leads by example on accountability. She owns her mistakes openly, then learns from them.
That culture spreads. When the boss admits a mistake, the team stops hiding theirs.
Staff turnover, market shifts, supplier headaches, she takes them head on. She analyses, accepts the call, adjusts.
The lesson. Tools and ads grow a brand for a while. A team that genuinely cares grows it for years.
How does Purple Carrot use technology to stay lean?
Alita does not hoard the creative work. Her whole team uses tools like Canva.
So everyone can contribute designs and content, not just one bottlenecked designer.
She also upgraded the courier and logistics systems. Early on, everything was manual. Writing addresses by hand. Packing chaos.
Every second saved on admin is a second earned somewhere that actually matters.
This is the unsexy side of growth. It does not show up on Instagram. It shows up in your margin.
The lesson. Kill the admin. A lean back office is what lets a five-person team ship like a fifty-person one.
What can your store steal from Purple Carrot?
You do not need a nickel allergy or 99 spare rings to use this thinking. You need the discipline underneath it.
- Solve a real problem. The best products fix something that already annoys real people.
- Get online before you have to. The store you build today is your safety net in the next storm.
- Do not fear the tools. Learn ads properly instead of boosting and hoping.
- Refuse the race to the bottom. You cannot out-cheap Shein. You can out-care it.
- Make it personal. Personalised products and human service are moats importers cannot copy.
- Stand behind your product. Warranties and after-sales help turn one order into a lifetime customer.
- Know your numbers. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Watch the margin, not the headline.
- Hire for heart. Skills can be taught. Caring cannot.
That is the whole game. No luck. No guru course with a Lamborghini on the thumbnail. Just a real problem solved well, then run with discipline.
How V8 Media builds ecommerce brands like this
Sending more traffic to a store that does not convert is just paying more to lose. We fix the leak first. Then we pour fuel on it.
We run both sides. Meta Ads and Google Ads to bring the right buyers. Then we sharpen the offer, the page, and the checkout, because traffic alone never fixed a broken store.
It is the same playbook Alita ran. Real problem, online early, personal experience, tight numbers. We just do it for you.
We have done this since 2018. R2+ billion in client sales. Win the click, then win the sale.
Frequently asked questions
What is Purple Carrot and what does it sell?
Purple Carrot is a South African jewellery brand founded by Alita du Plessis and based in Pretoria. It sells hypoallergenic, nickel-free stainless steel jewellery, including necklaces, pendants, bracelets, bangles, earrings, rings, and personalised pieces, plus a range of leather goods. It sells direct to consumer through its own Shopify store at purple-carrot.co.za.
Who founded Purple Carrot?
Purple Carrot was founded by Alita du Plessis. She started it after a nickel allergy meant she could not wear traditional metals, including her own wedding ring, and discovered stainless steel was the only metal that did not irritate her skin. Unable to find stylish stainless steel jewellery in South Africa, she designed her own and built the brand from the leftover 99 rings of her first production batch.
Why is Purple Carrot jewellery hypoallergenic?
Purple Carrot uses stainless steel, which is nickel-free and does not irritate sensitive skin. Nickel is the most common cause of metal allergies, so removing it makes the jewellery safe for people who react to ordinary metals. The brand describes its hypoallergenic pieces as well suited to the South African climate, since they will not tarnish or irritate the skin.
How does Purple Carrot compete with Shein and Temu?
Instead of competing on price, Purple Carrot competes on personalisation, local craftsmanship, and service. Per the V8 Media interview, Alita treated the arrival of low-cost importers as a reason to innovate rather than a threat, leaning into design-your-own products, hypoallergenic quality, and personal after-sales help that mass overseas sellers cannot match. She also expanded into personalised leather goods.
How did Purple Carrot survive COVID-19?
Per the V8 Media interview, Alita's separate events company of 19 years shut down during COVID, but Purple Carrot thrived because it was already selling online when shoppers moved to ecommerce. Having built a real online store early, before lockdown forced the issue, is what allowed the brand to keep selling through 2020.
What can ecommerce owners learn from Purple Carrot?
Solve a real problem. Get online before you are forced to. Learn proper ads, not just the Boost button. Refuse to race Shein to the bottom on price. Make it personal. Back your product. And watch profit, not revenue. As Alita puts it, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.
Key takeaways
- Purple Carrot is a Pretoria-based stainless steel jewellery brand founded by Alita du Plessis, selling hypoallergenic, nickel-free, personalised jewellery and leather goods.
- It began by accident: a nickel allergy meant she could only wear stainless steel, so she designed her own ring and built a brand from the leftover 99 rings of the batch.
- Going online early, first on Wix then Shopify, is what let the brand thrive during COVID while her 19-year events company closed.
- Instead of racing Shein and Temu to the bottom on price, she won on personalisation, local craftsmanship, and after-sales service.
- She runs tight on numbers ("revenue is vanity, profit is sanity") and hires for personality and culture fit over raw skills.
- The transferable playbook: solve a real problem, get online early, make it personal, stand behind the product, and protect your margin.
Want to build an ecommerce brand like Purple Carrot?
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