10 May 2007

ANC pimps da juice


Nelly, the singer/rapper/businessman/artist is now firmly back in the "motherland" after signing a groundbreaking deal with politician/lawyer/businessman Mathews Phosa. Phosa, a prominent member of the ruling ANC, is, through his company Mojalife (which is township lingo for “good life”), bringing Pimpjuice to South Africa.

Pimp(who)? Clearly if you don't know you are possibly not watching a whole of MTV Base and Channel O. Pimpjuice, launched in the US in 2003, is an energy drink in the mould of Red Bull. It has no fat and contains high amounts of vitamin C, among its 21 or so ingredients.

Nelly told journalists that already about 1.5 million cans of Pimpjuice have been –pre-produced for the SA market, which launches the product on 18 May. Manufacturing of Pimpjuice in SA will begin shortly after launch. It is not yet clear how well this product will do in SA since Red Bull has the market very tightly run, with their own fridge space allocated in a lot of retailers’ floors already. We saw how in 1994 Pepsi flunked out of the country in a big way after being crushed out of the market by Coca-Cola just months after re-launching.

Other Nelly products to follow include the clothing labels Vokal and Applebottom, as well as Derry Entertainment, the record label. Will Nelly sign only rappers to the label or will we see some kwaito and even mbaqanga cats up in there? And who will run things (think of the saga of Akon’s Konvict Muzik and your boy T-bo Touch…)? We’ll see.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was really pissed off when I heard Phosa was bringing the bev into the country, especially after the hard work dad, trey and i put into. But there seems to be some mshika-shika with the PJ biz plan