Ten years ago, we introduced the Tutu Pendant to the world.
At the time, we couldn’t have known what it would come to represent.
The first Tutu Pendant we ever made was delivered in a Ghana Must Go bag.
In South Africa, it’s more affectionately known as the No Problem bag.
At the time, we’d never designed a product before. We’d certainly never packaged one.
The pendant was too large to fit into a standard double-wall box, so we did what seemed perfectly logical to us. We bought a No Problem bag, carefully placed the sample inside and delivered it.
Looking back now, it’s hard not to laugh.
Today we know that placing an 8kg lighting piece inside a flimsy woven bag is probably one of the worst packaging decisions you could make.
Fortunately for us, good fortune was on our side.
The pendant arrived safely.
What we didn’t realise then was that the Tutu pendant would spend the next ten years teaching us lessons that reached far beyond design.
That first sample had been made for Nando’s Hot Young Designers. We had responded to a brief for pendant lighting despite having never designed or manufactured a product before.
To our surprise, we won.
Winning the competition meant we suddenly had our first order.
It also meant we had to figure everything else out.
The first time we delivered the pendants, we didn’t own a vehicle big enough to transport them. So we spent the morning driving around Johannesburg looking for somewhere to rent a van. Eventually, outside a Builders Warehouse, we spotted a handwritten sign that simply read, “Rent a Bakkie.” That van became our delivery vehicle. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was enough. Looking back, it’s remarkable how much of those early days was built on improvisation. Not carelessness. Ingenuity.
The Tutu itself is an homage to the Xibelani, the distinctive traditional skirt worn by Xitsonga women. More than traditional dress, the Xibelani is an expression of identity, celebration and cultural pride. Its sculptural form comes alive in movement, creating a silhouette that is instantly recognisable.
When we designed the Tutu, we weren’t interested in reproducing the Xibelani. We wanted to reinterpret its unmistakable silhouette into a contemporary object. We wanted to honour a cultural tradition while contributing something new to the language of contemporary South African design.
As the Tutu pendant found homes beyond South Africa, it continued to educate us.
There was the shipment to Malaysia where every wooden bead had worked itself loose during transit. Instead of hanging from the pendant as intended, they were scattered across the bottom of the crate.
There was the occasion when customs officials, carrying out a routine security inspection, cut the drawcord that held the woven form together.
Each challenge forced us to think differently. We learned that designing the product was only the beginning. We also had to learn how to manufacture it consistently, package it thoughtfully, protect it in transit and anticipate problems we’d never imagined.
Long before the Tutu found its place in the permanent collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, South Africa embraced it first.
In 2018, it was voted the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa. That recognition gave us confidence that this way of seeing the world—was worth pursuing.
Over the years, the Tutu has found homes in corporate offices, restaurants, hotels, game reserves, universities and private residences around the world. In every space, it has quietly become part of someone else’s story.
As Mash.T grew, opportunities arrived that once felt unimaginable.
The Hlabisa Bench entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We were invited by Dolce & Gabbana to create a work for their private collection.
Like any firstborn, it taught us things no one else could have.
It gave us confidence before we had much reason to feel confident. It opened doors we didn’t even know existed. It challenged us to believe that our perspective, informed by South Africa’s extraordinary traditions of making, belonged in the global design conversation.
As we celebrate ten years of the Tutu, our gratitude belongs to everyone who believed in it before history had been written.
To the Conscious Aesthetes—architects, interior designers, specifiers, institutions, electrical engineers, design professionals and homeowners—who found a place for it in the spaces they imagined.
To the artisans whose hands have shaped every Tutu over the last decade. To the team members who solved problems no one had encountered before. And to South Africa, for first believing that this piece had something worth saying.
The Tutu will always occupy a special place at Mash.T. Not because it is our oldest piece, but because it gave us our voice.
The Next Chapter
Ten years later, we’re still learning.
That same spirit of curiosity that gave birth to the Tutu pendant continues to shape how we work today.
Our newest lighting collection, Axis, wasn’t born from a design brief. It emerged from something much older: apprenticeship.
For months, master makers with more than three decades of experience worked alongside emerging makers in our workshop. In the process of demonstrating, correcting, questioning and trying again, new ideas began to surface. Those ideas became the Axis Collection.
If the Tutu taught us that South African stories deserve a place in contemporary design, Axis reminds us that those stories only endure when knowledge is passed from one generation of makers to the next.
