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It's Chai Time with Wesley Moonsamy

Wesley Moonsamy completed his Master's Degree in Information Systems
at the College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) in 2021. His
master's project was supervised by Professor Shawren Singh, chair of the
Department of Information Systems at CSET. As part of the college's
“Bakae – where are they?” programme that tracks the progress of its alumni,
we had a brief chat with Wesley to nd out how the qualication obtained
has equipped him and shaped his career. This is what he had to say.

After being retrenched early in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic started
sweeping through South Africa, nding employment didn't seem like an
option. I read a quote that said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get”. I
therefore decided to work hard, stay on track and complete the last leg of
my master's degree in information systems through Unisa whilst looking
into possible business ventures.

My journey with Unisa started in 2006 when I registered for an honours
degree in Computer Science part time, whilst working full time. After
working in several industries such as retail, loyalty and manufacturing, and
given my strong information systems background (strengthened by my
master's degree), I decided to start an online store.

My wife and business partner suggested that we sell items that are not
commonly sold by the major retailers and are therefore hard to nd. It
immediately occurred to me that chai (a spicy avoured tea) is something
that is enjoyable and becoming more popular, but difficult to nd. Armed
with a small initial capital, we set out to nd suppliers of chai. As we went
about nding suppliers, we met other local entrepreneurs who had also
been hit hard by the economic setbacks. At this point, our vision started to
take shape and we realised that we wanted to help and promote other local
entrepreneurs. With this realisation came the decision to form a relationship
with other business owners and we agreed to add their products to our
online platform once it was ready.

Based on basic computer science principles, I decided not to reinvent the
wheel but to utilise an existing e-commerce platform that can be
customised to suit our needs. Within two weeks and with limited sleep, we
launched www.itschaitime.co.za on 27 September 2021 with a product
range of around 30 items. A month later, we had around 50 products on our
site. We have since tripled our offering to more than 150 products, including

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