The newly appointed Managing Director, Mushambi Mutuma and Executive Creative Director, Lerato Tshabalala are part of the senior team, headed up by founder Gugu Mandala. They have been tasked with growing the business and building team capacity as it heads into 2021.
Mutuma joined the business as Managing Director in August 2020 with the core responsibility of giving strategic guidance and direction to the team in order to meet financial goals, as well as overseeing the vision and long-term goals as a business.
Mutuma joins with 12 years’ experience in building brands and businesses across the African continent as well as the United States. He has served as a strategic advisor to accelerators and incubators such as AlphaCode, Standard Bank and The Innovators Hub, and is a published author of Tech Adjacent and speaker on tech issues and trends.
‘I have been brought in to optimise and fine-tune a solid business with many opportunities in order to prepare us for further scale as a growing agency. It is important to further entrench ourselves with our clients, further establish our brand and grow our capabilities and resources as a team,’ he said.
‘We are proud to be a growing 100% black-owned and predominantly female-led business, and I am looking forward to continuing to deliver amazing work for our clients and increasing our industry footprint in the years to come,’ he said. ‘I’ve come into a team already committed to excellence which made it really easy for me to join. Now, my challenge is managing our next level of growth with this as a solid foundation.’
Earlier this year, Tshabalala joined as Executive Creative Director. She comes with previous experience as a Creative Director at both Ogilvy and Wunderman, having started her career in media as an editor and writer.
‘My immediate priority is developing data-driven creativity, as we forge ahead in getting even more digital than we are right now, producing award-winning content (although this is not the primary focus) and making sure we have fun while doing the best work and solving business problems for our clients,’ said Tshabalala.
Black Powder has also recently made further appointments to Head of Client Service and Head of Digital roles and is currently expanding its senior roles in both the Strategy and Creative divisions.
