Brett Austin at the KZN Investment Conference
The KwaZulu-Natal Investment Conference at the Durban ICC is where the province puts its businesses in front of investors and trade delegations, and Natural Elixir took a stand there alongside a good many companies considerably larger than it is.
Brett sat down for an interview on the exhibition floor. It is worth the eight minutes, and it is the most complete account of the brand in his own words that exists on video.
How a Durban nightclub owner ended up making a health tonic
The part of the interview people tend to remember is the beginning, because it is not the biography you would guess from a bottle of turmeric and cayenne.
Brett was a club DJ from the age of fifteen and later a nightclub owner in Durban. That meant finishing work at five in the morning, most nights, for years, with everything that tends to come with that life. He is entirely open about it, including the parts that do not flatter him, and it is the reason he ended up reading about plants in the first place. His own account of that period is on this site in full.
He spent twenty years running rooms that sold people a hard night. He now spends his weekends handing out something to drink instead.
What he says about that turn is the most interesting idea in the interview, and it is not really a business idea at all. He does not treat the nightclub years as time wasted or as a past to be disowned. He treats them as the apprenticeship: the same instinct for a room, the same appetite for building things, pointed somewhere else. He calls it a matter of putting something better back than he took out.
Who actually runs Natural Elixir
Brett is straightforward about this in a way founders usually are not: he does not want to run a company. He describes himself as a builder and a maker rather than an executive, and says plainly that the administrative side of an enterprise holds no interest for him whatsoever.
So he does not do it. Martin McHale, who previously ran Durban’s Origin Nightclub and Club 330, handles the business: the commercial side, the negotiations, the logistics, the retail relationships and the conference floor. Brett keeps the formulation, the making, and the events where people actually taste the stuff. His wife works the stand alongside Martin.
It is a small thing and it explains a lot about why the product has not drifted. The person who cares about what goes in the bottle is not the person under pressure to widen the margin.
What a plumber understands about health that most people miss
Before any of this, Brett worked in the trades. He has plumbed thousands of houses, worked on motor vehicles, built yachts and put up venues, and he wrote a book somewhere in the middle of it called Self Improvement.
It shows in how he explains things. Ask him about health and you will get a metaphor about clean water in and waste water out, because that is the language he has. Whatever you make of the analogy, the practical conclusion he draws from it is unremarkable and correct: put decent things in, keep moving, and stop putting in the things that were causing the trouble.
Still doing the buying himself. A production run starts with a bakkie and a market.
How a health tonic ends up on sale at a music festival
He still DJs. What has changed is what is on sale behind him.
Rather than leaving the festival circuit, Brett works it differently: a stand serving alcohol-free botanical drinks, cold-pressed juices, smoothies and tonic shots, at events where the bar is usually the only option. He is blunt about the logic. Telling people to give things up rarely works. Giving them something else to hold at midnight sometimes does.
It is also, commercially, the most sensible thing in the interview. The alcohol-free category is growing quickly, festivals are full of people who would rather not drink and have nowhere to go, and he has twenty years of contacts in exactly that industry.
Can a South African wellness brand sell to the world?
The reason for being at the ICC at all was to talk to people who could take the brand further than South Africa, and the stand had trade delegations through it, including from China.
The stated ambition over ten years is for Natural Elixir to be a recognised name in functional drinks internationally rather than a South African speciality. That is a long way from a recipe made in one man’s kitchen for himself, and the interview is a decent record of the distance already covered.
The tonic itselfTen raw plants, no sugar and no preservative, in a 750 ml bottle. What is in it, how the brand began, or the range. If you would rather buy it in person, the store locator lists the stockists.
Brett can be reached directly at brett@naturalelixir.co.za, which is not something most founders put on a website, and is fairly typical of him.
This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Views expressed in the interview are the speaker’s own. Natural Elixir is a natural health tonic and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always speak to a healthcare professional before changing your diet, supplements, or medication, and never stop prescribed treatment without medical guidance.