A phased plan for taking Bears & Friends online in South Africa — starting with the page you have just looked at, and setting out honestly what should and should not follow it.
You want a South African web presence for Bears & Friends. Not a shop like the Hong Kong site — a page that explains the brand, shows the products that are actually coming here, and gives people a way to make contact. Content can be adapted from the German and Hong Kong sites, and you are trying to get workable files out of the Hong Kong office. Stephanie has ideas of her own and we are waiting on those. Facebook and Instagram still need opening. The domain bears-friends.co.za already exists, and we agreed that mail goes on GoDaddy while I run the site on my own server.
I built the Phase 1 page first so there is something concrete to react to rather than a description of one. It uses your real logo artwork, the two product photographs taken out of the specification PDFs, and the actual figures from those sheets — article numbers, piece weights, shelf life, the flavour-to-colour list, nutrition per serving and the allergen position. Nothing on it is invented.
It lives at bears-and-friends.mare-greyling.com while we work on it. Nothing touches bears-friends.co.za until you are both happy — at that point it is a DNS change, not a rebuild.
What is deliberately missing. No launch date, no prices, no store addresses, no testimonials, and no claim of being anyone’s number one. Those need to come from you or from Germany before they go on a public page. Putting placeholder versions there now is how a brand ends up correcting itself in public.
Two lines I would like you to check. The enquiry panel says the South African team will be in touch — if that is one person rather than a team, tell me and I will change it. And the page states the gummies are made in the Bavarian Forest, which I took from the Hong Kong site; the German company page does not say it, so it is worth a word with Germany before it stays.
The domain is not a decision — you already have it. bears-friends.co.za is registered and its DNS points at a server, but nothing answers there on either http or https. Today the address exists and serves nothing, which is the ideal starting position: no live site to break and no waiting on a registration.
The one thing I need. Where the domain is currently registered, and who holds that login. To move DNS management to GoDaddy and put mail on it, someone has to be able to sign in to the account it sits in today. If that is Germany rather than you, it is worth asking now — it is usually the slowest step in the whole job.
You asked what package to get. These are GoDaddy’s South African business email prices as they stand today.
| Plan | What it gives you | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Pro Light | 10 GB per mailbox, shared calendars and contacts, anti-spam. Everything a shop actually needs. | R22,00 |
| Pro Plus | 30 GB, plus writing tools and multi-account support. GoDaddy’s own recommendation. | R33,00 |
| Premium | 50 GB, email templates, read receipts, aliases. | R55,00 |
| Ultra | 100 GB, campaigns, appointment booking, tracking. | R85,00 |
Those are introductory prices for the first year and they renew higher. GoDaddy states the renewal rate at checkout, and I will read it to you before anything is bought rather than after. Pro Light is what I would take — three or four mailboxes at R22 each is under R100 a month, and moving up a tier later takes a minute. The paid tiers above it are marketing tooling you do not need before there is a product on a shelf.
You floated Bears.friends@, Bears-friends@, BearsFriendsZA@ and BearsandFriends@. Those all made sense when the address was going to sit on gmail.com, where the brand has to be on the left of the @ because the right side belongs to Google. On your own domain the right side already says who you are, so repeating it reads oddly — bearsandfriends@bears-friends.co.za says it twice. On your own domain the left side should say what the mailbox is for.
| Address | Who reads it |
|---|---|
| info@bears‑friends.co.za | The public address — on the site, on packaging, in social bios. |
| trade@bears‑friends.co.za | Retailers and distributors, kept separate so those never get lost in general mail. |
| volker@bears‑friends.co.za | You. |
| stephanie@bears‑friends.co.za | Stephanie. |
Four mailboxes on Pro Light is R88 a month at today’s first-term price. If you would rather keep it to two for now, info@ and trade@ are the two that matter — personal addresses can be added the day someone needs one.
One page, static, fast, with no moving parts to break. Brand story and the thirty-year timeline, the products that are confirmed, full ingredient and allergen transparency, and an enquiry form split between trade and public. It works on a phone, it works in dark mode, and the whole thing is four files.
A page per product carrying the specification sheet in readable form, with a short link and a QR code per article number. A shopper standing at the shelf scans the pack and reads the ingredients; a buyer gets a link instead of a PDF attachment. This is where your existing documentation becomes an asset rather than a folder.
The enquiry form wired to a real mailbox with an automatic acknowledgement, a downloadable trade sheet, and a POPIA consent line and privacy note for anyone joining a mailing list. Small work, but it is the difference between a page that looks open for business and one that is.
Not my build, but it belongs in the plan because it changes what the site needs. Open the accounts on the company mail address rather than a personal one, secure the handles before someone else does, and point both bios at this page. The site then has somewhere to send people, and the accounts have something to link to.
Selling online in South Africa means payments, courier integration, stock counts, returns and someone packing boxes every day. It is a business decision more than a technical one. When the enquiries from Phase 3 show real demand, this page becomes the shop’s front page rather than being thrown away — which is the main reason I built Phase 1 as a static page now instead of a half-finished shop.
Worth building when there is something to come back to — a loyalty card, a pick-and-mix order for collection, store stock. Not worth building as a wrapper around a website; people will not install that, and an unused app on a store listing reflects worse on the brand than no app at all. If the retail model turns out to be your own stores rather than distribution, this moves up the list considerably.
You asked me to map the whole road, so here it is with a straight answer attached. A watch app for a confectionery brand has no job to do — nobody checks a wrist for gummy bears. What can genuinely earn its keep in a store is a tablet at the counter for the pick-and-mix weigh-and-price, and the same spec pages from Phase 2 on a screen customers can reach. I would rather build that than a watch face, and I would rather tell you so now than bill you for it later.
Where is bears-friends.co.za registered, and who has that login?Nothing can point anywhere until someone can reach the DNS. In my experience this is the step that quietly costs a fortnight.
Do you have written permission from Germany to use the name and logo on a South African site?The logo files you sent are print artwork. Having the file and being cleared to publish it are separate things — and since 2024 the brand sits under a combined group, so permission may need to come from further up than before.
Which products are actually confirmed for South Africa, and how many to start?I have specifications for two: article 123119 and article 123145. The page is built around those.
Can Hong Kong or Germany supply usable content — the English brand text, product photography, and the logo in vector for screen?Failing that I work from what is on the public sites, which is thinner and not mine to promise.
Which mail address do you want, and who reads it?The form has nowhere to send to until this exists. It is the smallest item on the list and it blocks going live.
What is the retail model — your own store, a distributor into existing retailers, or online only?This changes what the page asks visitors to do, and decides Phases 5 to 7 outright.
English only, or English and Afrikaans?Cheap to plan for now, expensive to retrofit once there are many pages.
Is there a launch date I should be working back from?Nothing on the page states one until you give me one.
Look at the page with Stephanie and tell me what is wrong with it — wording, order of sections, anything that misrepresents the brand. We can go back and forth as many times as it takes; I only move it to the real domain once you are both happy. Then answer questions 1, 5 and 3 above, in that order of urgency. I move the DNS, set up the mailboxes, point bears-friends.co.za at the page, and you have a live South African address to give people.
Everything after that waits for a reason. I would rather build Phase 2 in three months because the enquiries justified it than build Phases 2 to 7 now and watch most of it go unused.
Fees are not in this document on purpose — I would rather agree those with you against a scope you have actually read than attach a number to a plan you might still want to change.