DumaTau boutique trading store

One of Wilderness Safaris’ most important values is its focus on Community, and one of the best ways for you as a guest to help us support local communities is to make a stop at the beautiful DumaTau Safari Boutique. Located at the Osprey Retreat, this is the perfect spot to pick up a memento of your journey or buy a thoughtful gift for a loved one back home.

The boutique with a variety of items created and designed by the people of Botswana and Africa, and encourages sustainability by helping locals earn an income through their handcrafted masterpieces.

Nako Timepieces

Botswana has a timeless quality, and at the same time, each moment lived there has an intensity unmatched anywhere else. Nako Timepieces – named, with elegant simplicity, after the local word for ‘time’ – blend Swiss chronometric expertise with cultural and historical significance, based on ancestral methods of recording and interpreting the passage of time. Botswana is a country gracefully suspended between the old and the new, where yesterday and tomorrow are ever-present, and now is the most important of all. Nako makes watches for the time of your life.

Kobe Twins Leatherwork

This local Botswana brand derives its authenticity from the cultural significance of cattle – not so much as a source of food, but as a store of wealth. This is reflected in the richness of the designs and the quality of the artisanship. A fusion of practicality and beauty, each handbag, wallet and belt is not only made to last, but designed to accompany you as you make your own enduring memories. The soft, supple leather has been worked, both in its natural hues and treated to achieve a range of strikingly stylish colours.

Secret Kalahari

Secret Kalahari was founded by Johannes Visagie, who grew up in Werda, a remote village in southern Botswana. Inspired by his grandparents’ longevity (they lived to be 98 and 101 years old) and realising donkey milk constituted a significant part of their daily diet, he researched its properties and found it to be a nutritional powerhouse, packed with essential vitamins, casein, and lactose. Today, Secret Kalahari’s donkey’s milk products range from cosmetics – such as soaps, lotions, creams, shampoos, ointments, and scrubs – to indigenous capsule remedies for various ailments – including high blood pressure and back pain – using powdered donkey’s milk and plant extracts indigenous to the Kalahari.

Kuru Arts

Founded in 1990 by the Kuru Development Trust in Botswana’s vast tracts of Kalahari sandveld, this project keeps alive the artistic traditions of Botswana’s San heritage. Contemporary artists bring a fresh perspective to these sacred designs through the use of modern materials and techniques to reimagine their traditions. In this way, they can connect with their ancestors and develop a unique economic resource that both respects and adds value to their creativity. Their art has graced both postage stamps and the tails of airliners – a testament to its universal relevance.

Christiane Stolhofer

Christiane sees the beauty in each piece of fallen hardwood, and takes her direction from the natural forms of knots and whorls to liberate the story of each tree. Both her wooden carvings and their progeny, her silver and bronze miniatures (created using a fascinating blend of ultra-modern 3D computer scanning and the traditional ‘lost wax’ casting technique), capture the essence of nature as seen through the eyes of the artist. Christiane refers to this process as ‘shaping a life through sculpture’ and her pieces have vibrancy and energy that speaks to this process.