While most business owners threw in the towel during the hardships of the pandemic lockdown, founder and chief executive of J’adore D’amour, Mathapelo Pitse, garnered the faith to quit her full-time job in September last year to pursue a life in the footwear business.

Pitse, 33, is the founder of a luxury female shoe brand that designs and manufactures heels for the “sophisticated, audacious and timeless woman”.

According to Pitse, the brand “embodies a highly collaborative spirit as well as female empowerment”.

Having her full-time job as her backup plan while not relying solely on her shoe business as her primary stream of income, the Katlehong-born Pitse decided to free-fall into the entrepreneurial space with the belief that “it was now or never” to immerse herself in her online luxury shoe brand.

“In 2017, I registered another business which was at first called My Star Box before I re-branded it to J’adore D’amour, where we were selling one shoe at a time that was imported. At the same time as running this, I was working a full-time job – I would usually try to find a balance of working full time and running a business until last year September when I resigned to become the founder and CEO of my luxury shoe brand.

“This is where I said to myself that I was going to make it work,” Pitse says.

She says her drive and tenacity for plunging herself full-time into her business in spite of the harsh economic times stems from her will of wanting to become successful.

“I wanted to do something that I loved. So, fortunately, with lockdown, I got to sit down and re-evaluate my life, the brand and where I wanted to go because when I was still working, I really didn’t get much time to map out the vision of where my online business was going.”

Despite her parents not being able to afford her the opportunity to go to university to further her studies, Pitse continues to defy the odds in the business world with her belief that the “school of life” is what taught and shaped her to be a savvy entrepreneur.