behind the counter x Bheki Dube
CURIOCITY, South Africa
Meet Bheki Dube, Founder and CEO of CURIOCITY, in South Africa; a successful entrepreneur and thought leader who started his journey at the mere age of 16 and opened his first Curiocity Hostel in Johannesburg at the age of 21!
A man with an iron will to bring his pioneering visions to life and driven by his passion to serve his community. His journey is deeply inspired by the culturally-rooted tales of his Grandmother, encouraging him to dream big and instilling in him an unwavering faith that nothing is impossible to achieve.
Join us as Bheki takes us through his incredibly inspirational story, and shares his valuable insights on community building and staff motivation.
How did your journey begin in the Hospitality world?
If I start to really reflect on the question and look at it now, it springs from a very young age for me. I personally believe that we are all descendants of African Griots. Griots are storytellers, writers, poets and a lot of what I do today is deeply influenced by my grandmother, who would narrate these stories and these tales of Africa.
Fast forward to now, the purpose of Curiocity really is to share a city, and its neighbourhood and the community story; it’s coined at heart. So subconsciously it was something very inherent that was almost passed on from my grandmother to me.
The formal side of things really began when I started my first company at the age of 16. I was doing walking tours of Johannesburg even before Johannesburg was a very favorable place.
I would do these walking tours on the weekends and during school holidays I would also house-sit people’s homes, so my entrepreneurial journey started at a very young age. I guess from that I realized that people were not just interested in coming to the city for three hours and then flying out. They were also interested in living, working, engaging even further and going more in-depth into the city skin. So at 16 is when I realized I needed to open a bigger space than just the walking tours. The concept of Curiocity then started developing from there.
When I was 18, my two friends and I went backpacking around South Africa we saw a lot of disparities; lack of innovation, experience and design and that’s what really made me come back into my city and say hey, “I want to open some sort of accommodation concepts that’s design-led, experience-focused but that’s also led by the youth.” That’s what really sparked this idea and I needed to let this dream come alive. I started then merging my walking tours and a place for people to sleep and stay, so I opened the first Curiocity Hostel in Johannesberg when I was 21.
That's incredible! How did it go from there, what was next?
Curiocity Johannesburg Hostel was the first hostel, and it’s in the Maboneng Precinct. Maboneng when translated, means the place of light and back then when I started the hostel, the area was going through a lot of urban regeneration. I was seeing many people come back into the city, you know, like artists occupying old buildings and turning them into art studios. I guess I was just there at the right place at the right time and I knew the developers of the neighbourhood who were buying up these properties and I pitched this concept of Curiocity. It was through that interaction that I could get financial backing and funds for my first accommodation site.
So when I reflect now you know, it’s like you walk into Curiocity Johannesburg and it’s raw, it’s industrial Chic, it’s inspired by the mining in Johannesburg so we’ve brought all those elements into the space. It was the premises of the Pacific Press during the apartheid era, which published material for the ANC and Black Sash and is said to have offered refuge to struggle stalwarts like Mandela and Slovo. So there’s like a lot of printing publications retained and we have a great bar with an amazing vibe called the hideout bar.
After that, I went on and opened 12 Decades Art Hotel in Johannesburg. The hotel has 12 unique rooms that capture the history of Johannesburg from 1886 to 2006 with rooms designed and conceptualised by some of South Africa’s most celebrated artists and designers.
Now we’ve got another accommodation place on that same street in Maboneng called Fox Street Studios, which are luxury penthouses. It was previously an old printing work that has now been transformed into an urban boutique hotel offering both short-term and long-term loft space rentals, events venue and exhibition space.
After opening the first Curiocity Hostel in 2013, when I was 21, I started realizing that these communities that I was hosting were not just coming to South Africa for a few days or week but they were staying for a month in South Africa. So I started thinking about how to connect the dots and connect in a way to create a South African road map and then also parallelly start thinking about how do I tap into the rest of Africa.
I’m a pan-Africanist poet at heart and I believe we are all descendants of African Griots like I mentioned before, so I was also thinking about how do we share these narratives across Africa and create a product and a brand that can just connect the entire continent.
I then went on and I opened my second site in Durban when I was 26. There we converted an old British colonial style building into a Curiocity Durban Hostel. Then in 2019 I’d grown and I could chew on a bit more, so I went to Capetown and started the Curiocity Cape Town Hotel; a sophisticated design-led hybrid hotel that’s set in a modernist three-storey building in the city’s heart, in the Green Point neighbourhood.
It’s really all about allowing the history, heritage and the environment of these spaces to dictate that design and the experiences around the product.
What inspired you to start hybrid hotels highly focused on design, in particular?
There were a few influences why I focused on the design and just completely shift the South African landscape in terms of hybrid accommodation. First, the current landscape when I started out was a very “mom and pop” run. It was like old people have either retired from their jobs and then they set up some sort of backpackers which were grimly.
Also during my travels around South Africa, I was facing a lot of racism. I mean this is like 10 years ago and I thought, “wow! why are people so racist towards locals?” They wouldn’t allow local black people to stay in these spaces, so that shifted my perspective completely too.
Another thing is that I always wanted to study architecture, I was actually denied access to architecture school, but I grew up amongst a lot of architects, thinkers and pan-Africanists and I’ve always been very much dedicated to design aesthetics. There’s also the experience from these things that I’ve always wanted to share, like our positive stories.
There are young kids like me who think vaster than just the lines of demarcation, who think vaster than the space that they’ve been born or bred in, so it was merging that and my love for architecture design while also trying to confront problems like lack of innovation.
I guess when I came in, it really broadened the horizons because no one really knew me from Adam! I was just this kid who’s 21 and just opened this thing, bringing in all these stories and design aesthetics.
When I reflect now, the ‘hybridness’ of this evolution has kind of grown with my personal evolution. When I was 21, I was doing the typical backpacker thing which still had the design ethos in it. But now I’m 29 and I’m designing products I want to stay and live in. So it’s grown with my personal evolution really, as well as my community and team’s personal evolution too.
For example, we are currently in the process of launching Farmhouse — a regenerative travel & stay experience and we are very excited about it.
The concept behind Farmhouse is to get back to nature’s cradle, where it all began and rejuvinate in a place of serenity, comfort and harmony.
What has been the driving force behind you and your team, especially during the pandemic outbreak?
I think there are a few key pillars to what’s kept us going. For me, as a leader, it’s about one, the teams who are really the backbone of Curiocity and two, the community that we’ve built.
We’ve got a database of over 20,000 people who have subscribed to the Curiocity newsletter plus the social media content and people that follow us there. If you do start to ponder about what this Curiocity thing is, it’s about connecting the curious-minded people really, and it’s coined at heart. So what kept me going was one, my team; I had to lead a team, who are the backbone of Curiocity and who have helped grow this brand to what it is today. And two, we’ve got this community that we need to service and so we thought “okay, how do we become resilient in such a time? And how do we still continue service in this community?”
We had to make conscious decisions like we didn’t close our sights, we kept them open because some of our staff could then move in and stay on the premises. It didn’t matter if we had guests or not during the pandemic because the landlords still wanted full rentals. That’s mad in a time where the country and the entire world is going through a pandemic, you cannot expect full rentals from people. So I opened up the doors to Curiocity for my team as charity begins at home, you know.
That gave refuge to my team as a safe space for them to stay and then we went on and we started creating these online cultural programs to make sure that we still provide service to our community because there were people who had South Africa on the bucket list but couldn’t travel. So we thought, how do we service that community? How do we still have space for them to connect with us? So we did the stay up film which is online, which showcases the public art around our neighbourhood in Maboneng.
Also, part reason for not closing or taking that decision was that once you close it’s hard to open again. It also gave us a moment to really reflect, sanitize our admin office, our house and just focus on cleaning up the granular stuff in our business model and in our DNA. However, also to keep hope within the teams because once you lose that hope and people get stuck in that lockdown high-level restrictions, it’s hard to get out of it. So it was to really just keeping the hope and momentum going within the teams and also allowing them to innovate and think about how do we re-boost the tourism industry.
As a leader, how do you keep your staff motivated?
There are two sides to this answer. First, sometimes it feels like there is a shared vision and purpose because they’re all young people and they are learning from people who are young just like them rather than a 60-year-old white person telling them what to do. Inspiration comes closer to home. We’re growing this brand together and it’s a black African brand, so it’s closer to home.
Then again, sometimes it’s a challenge because we groom talent from grassroots-up. Most of these kids have never been to hospitality school, they’ve never done tourism before so you’re literally entrenching them into the business and trying to do business development from within. It’s tough because then sometimes they see you as a young guy and they think they can also do it, so they might go venture off and start their own thing and you’ve lost a bit of intellectual property there.
But I think the right ones always remain. We’ve been very fortunate (touch-wood!) that the right people have remained with us and have grown with us. We’ve got great stories in the Curiocity chain where someone starts off as a housekeeper and now they’re the Duty Manager. One of the front-house ladies is now the Group Operations Director, so really those case studies become quite an important thing and something that when looked back in retrospect, makes you smile.
I think even the ones that have left and started their own tour businesses, doing their own walking tours become a greater collective of us now. Not just those doing walking tours in these cities but a larger population of black kids really sharing and telling their narrative. So it’s good to look at that and see something that was just informal has now become a formal business.
Curiocity has really well-curated experiences and today’s travel is all about guest experiences, can you give some advice on it?
From the time we started off, it’s always been about the stories; there’ are a lot of things that tie together. When I started off as a tour guide, it wasn’t about just mere tourist rubbernecking of what makes up these stories. I’ve always been a lover of just curating, going in-depth, un-layering and unpacking these things. Also, just giving a new perspective to things.
Guest experience and the journey are very important to us, and they will always be. Our guest experience is our essence, so all these programs and activities that we put together are the essence of our business’s DNA and business model.
What’s interesting in relation to COVID and became quite important are some of the green offshoots of COVID, one being our immersive experiences and that’s what helped us during this time.
I reached out to the community that I service, from international business schools to local business schools. I told them “guys okay, now we can’t host you here but we’ve gone and put together these amazing immersive experiences with other thought leaders, not just Curiocity but with other interesting minds and entrepreneurs.” and then I asked them “how can we put this as an experience to your students, to your communities?” So that was something that we offered which became the green offshoot and it was quite important to observe and see that grow during the pandemic period.
What’s your favourite part about interacting with your guests?
I can’t single one really, there’s quite a few when I start to reflect now because we’re dealing in interesting communities. I think it’s being able to experience their changing narratives during their time with us. You see this shift that happens; they start becoming more open to you.
We’ve got the spirit of Ubuntu (the essence of being human) in South Africa and there’s no better hospitality than that and when someone gets that, there’s just this connection and that shift of perspective, which for me is very special and something that always remains with me.
