Life at the Bay

Having turned the dream of creating a ‘children’s paradise’ into a successfully running business, Sugar Bay’s Founding Director, Zoë Ellender, shares why the benefits of American summer camps inspired her to start her very own camp in South Africa. “As a child, I was given a lot of opportunities to go on holiday which didn’t require spending a lot of money. We would go to our grandparents on a little farm in the Free State, in Clocolan, which is along the Lesotho border. I would be surrounded by my older cousins who were great role models and we would be busy from sunrise to sunset; climbing mountains, building forts, jumping off cliffs and just going on escapades. When I began soul searching after realizing I was unhappy in my legal career, I cast my thoughts back to these moments in my life when I was happiest. I began recapturing my youth and parts of these holiday experiences. This is how my love for camp began, in a healthy environment, without any distractions, ...

Zoe Ellender is the camp director of Sugar Bay Resort. Ellender gave up her formal career in Law and Legal Services to pursue her dream of creating a safe and fun paradise, an American-styled summer camp in South Africa, especially for children.    Sixteen years later, she smiles and delegates as the proud owner of one of the best children’s camps in South Africa and being a cordial mom of three.  Ellender shares some of the challenges of being a businesswoman and a mother and how she overcomes them: Three years since the inception of Sugar Bay, Ellender was blessed with her first child, a beautiful daughter, whom she named Tao. During this period, Ellender was still fully involved in the day-to-day running of her business and also juggling being a mother to her firstborn.    “It certainly wasn’t easy being a mother and running a business that just recently kicked-off. At this early stage of the establishment of my company, there was pressure ...