We've been going to outdoor burns, festivals, fishing trips, kids' picnics, birthday parties, sundowners, you name it, for years and always struggled with a decent and reliable shade solution.

Because South Africa is lovely and hot and sunny throughout the year, we needed some affordable, stable, easy shade that anyone could set up (even in a bit of wind). Everyone camping around us at events had usually spent thousands on renting very fancy giant bedouin tents. Still, there was no way we could afford to rent one let alone buy one.

We'd seen those square gazebo's you can get a Kakro. They cost a few thousand and seem to only last a few camping trips before being blown into smithereens, or needing a whole family to hold onto each corner to stop it from being blown away. The metal frame is thinner than the fabric on our lucky jocks, and when they do get bent out of shape they're impossible to repair and end up in the rubbish bin.

So we decided to experiment and use the basic design of a fancy bedouin tent and make our own non-waterproof version at a much smaller scale. We bought a shed-load of spandex fabric in different colours from a factory store in town, and then bribed our mums to sew the panels all together one afternoon to make a large flexible fabric square. Realising that we needed to secure them somehow without tearing them, we then realised that we needed some tabs along the edges for a rope to give them tension, and our mums did a great job as before adding these in.

When we camped with friends, we soon realised that we didn't need to make individual massive Stretchy tents because we could easily weave smaller Stretchy tents together with the same bit of rope we use to secure them to the ground.

Our original tents are still going strong, they're a bit saggy and fraying in places (like us), have had a few holes sewn up, but after 10 years in the sun, wind and rain, they're still doing a great job of giving shade and not falling over.

We've been expanding our tent collection as we go, buying more knock-off fabric, making more tents, refining and improving the design from year to year. Soon enough, at a sweaty summer festival in Cape Town, someone commented on our schweet shade setup and asked where we got it from ... When they realised it was super easy, but they'd need a gang of mums to do all the hard work, they suggested we start making them and selling them because they wanted one too. 

Through a friend of a friend (thanks Rich!) We stumbled upon an Alladin's cave of top-quality stretchy fabric with the most nutty colours, designs and patterns on the planet. We knew we'd found something that would make our tents unique in a sea of beige and dark colours, and before you knew it, we'd registered a trademark and tried to open a bank account.

We're very fokken proud of our Stretchy tents; they're stopping waste and end-of-line fabric going into landfills, they're keeping local, seasonal sewing workers employed, and they're putting a fat smile on people's faces when they see a bright neon pink polkadot Stretchy tent at a heavy metal concert.

We make sure that they are of tip-top quality, affordable for South Africans, totally unique, and perfect for any situation where you might need a bit of shade. We hope you like them as much as we do.