Mihlali Ndamase Breaks New Ground with Malakyt
How the influencer is revolutionizing the beauty industry
Award-winning Youtuber and influencer, Mihlali Ndamase, has launched her new business venture Malakyt — a web-based site to find beauticians in your area. Though the concept is not new, Ndamase has identified an enormous gap in the market and is filling that gap with this exciting new venture.
When YouTube blew up in South Africa, the biggest category was beauty and makeup. Skits and vlogs were very close behind but in terms of building a consistent following and community, the beauty category was unmatched. Mihlali Ndamase was one of the first South African beauty creators on the platform and has over the years risen to be the biggest and most well known.
Ndamase has said in interviews that she has always dreamt of working in the beauty industry. YouTube came at the perfect time for her. In 2016, when she started her channel, there was already a big creator and consumer community in the USA which Ndamase was a part of as a consumer of the content. Seeing that there aren’t any popular South Africans doing beauty content creators, Ndamase recorded and uploaded a L’Oreal foundation review video and that set off the rest of her career.
By 2017, a year after Ndamase started her channel, she was the most popular beauty YouTuber in South Africa and soon after, the beauty catalogue was flooded with creators. Many of the most popular women YouTubers we have today started out as beauty content creators then later diversified or entirely pivoted their content. The most popular example is Naledi Mallela who started her channel making beauty content but none of her current active subscribers are expecting a beauty video from her.
The rise of YouTube in South Africa coincided with the popularization of Instagram influencers. I cannot give Ndamase the credit of having being the first Instagram influencer in South Africa but she was part of the first class of women who gained massive popularity on that app and were able to convert that popularity into a money-making venture. Certainly, in those days Ndamase was one of the biggest and most recognized influencers who gained her popularity solely on social media platforms. To further solidify this, Ndamase was the first South African influencer to reach 1 Million followers on Instagram.
I point this out to illustrate that Ndamase is always one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to digital entrepreneurship.
The financial affairs of influencers are quite confidential and we only know what they tell us. What Ndamase has told us in many interviews is that brands started approaching her for collaborations as soon as she uploaded her first YouTube video so we know she was making money in her first year on the platform. In a 2019 interview with Mpoomy Ledwaba, Ndamase revealed that she has made her first million rand off of influencer work, this was 4 years into her career as an influencer. In another interview with the YFM podcast, she revealed that she has signed a campaign worth R1 Million. It is almost unheard of in South Africa that one influencer would be paid that much for a single campaign.
I doubt many influencers can say they have been able to make this kind of money off of influencer work. Ndamase has a recorded history of being a leader of the pack when in comes to digital entrepreneurship, specifically in the beauty and lifestyle space.
With the steady decline of consumption of beauty content on YouTube, once again, Ndamase is showing off her forward thinking.
The explosion of makeup content on YouTube and Instagram has created a consumer base of people who want to have their makeup done professionally. Gone are the days when makeup artists and beauticians only work on professional sets and at weddings. These days people want their makeup done when attending a wedding, graduations, birthday parties, social events and other events where historically people were more than happy to attend with a basic makeup look.
This has created an massive demand for makeup artists and beauticians. Both beauticians and consumers have long struggled to find each other. For beauticians, you would need to create an active Instagram account to advertise the work that you do. Consumers also have an incredibly difficult task of finding beauticians and makeup artists in the area who’s work you are happy with.
Ndamase’s Malakyt solves that exact problem. The platform allows makeup artists, barbers and beauticians to advertise their work, contact details, services, pricing and location on the platform. Potential customers then go on the platform and are able to search for the beauty service they need in their area. There is no comparable service in the South African market right now that is providing this kind of service.
For artists who travel a lot and cannot afford to travel with a makeup artist, they can easily find one in the area they are in and can see that person’s work, rating, location, whether they do house calls or not and reviews of their work. Attending a wedding out of town or on vacation and looking for a barber or makeup artist? Malakyt is the most efficient platform for you to find what you are looking for.
Instagram could easily have created a feature that allows people to find a beauticians in their area because beauticians have for years used the platform as their main source of discoverability. Malakyt comes in to fill that discoverability gap.
When Ndamase initially hinted that she would be venturing into more beauty related business opportunities, everyone thought it would be a makeup or skincare product. This is a refreshing new venture for the budding businesswoman and is on track to becoming an integral part of how beauticians do their business.
Malakyt is relatively new and will obviously have teething problems. Currently, the platform is only available on a web version but it is very likely that they are working on a mobile app version.
It is not yet clear how Malakyt makes money. From what we know so far, there is no in-platform payment method so the customer pays the service provider directly. It does not look like Malakyt is able to take a cut from the price charged to the customer. At present, there is no cost to beauticians for being on the platform so they are not making money that way either. The site does not house any google ads so there is no revenue coming in from that source. The biggest challenge that faces the business currently is how to make money from it.
Mihlali Ndamase continues to be a leader of the pack in the beauty business and it will be interesting to see what how she builds Malakyt and what she ventures into next.
