For John and his wife Julie, who moved to Schoenmakerskop from the UK in 1995, the popularity of their product – appropriately called Repcillin – which they started off testing on friends three years ago, is mind-blowing.
Fast becoming a world-wide hit sold in stores ranging from pharmacies to US beauty salons and Scandinavian corner shops, Dr Croc products – the company‘s name – are in hot demand, despite being derived from a rather unusual source.
But sales have not been without controversy, with researchers publicly questioning the “healing powers” of the product. They say so little research has been conducted into the benefits of crocodile fat that no one really knows what it can do.
But for Sweet, 62, the proof is in the product‘s popularity.
“Even though it (crocodile fat) hasn‘t been tested, we know it works and it‘s a natural product,” said the Welshman who trained in London as a fashion photographer and later worked for a news agency in Tunbridge Wells.
“If it didn‘t work, our business wouldn‘t have expanded the way it had.”
Over the past three years more than 25000 tubs of the skin balm – which comes in 50g to 250g tubs, costing from R253 to R1200, depending on the size – have flown off shelves at stores and in online sales.
So popular has the product been that the company has expanded its range to now include soaps, sprays, bath oils and beauty serums. Sweet says the latter is becoming popular in the US beauty industry, despite its price tag of $150 (about R1400) per 50ml bottle.
The couple have now opened a factory shop at their Schoenmakerskop depot, which offers a wider range of products at a discount for local customers.
It all started when Sweet, a former horse-racing analyst and race tipster, had his interest piqued after seeing a BBC documentary on the internet which was filmed in Australia and detailed the miraculous healing powers of crocodile products.
“I wondered if crocodiles‘ strong healing properties were also present in their fat,” Sweet explained. “When I looked it up, I found it was used as far back as Cleopatra‘s times when she used to beautify herself with it.”
He then contacted one of the researchers involved in the documentary, herpetologist Adam Britton, who has since tested crocodile blood in an attempt to isolate elements for possible treatment of HIV and Aids.
“After speaking to Britton, I contacted a crocodile farm in Limpopo,” said Sweet. “It‘s the only farm in South Africa registered with the Convention of International Trade of Endangered Species (Cites) and is able to commercially farm them and sell their meat and by-products.”
After buying a small sample of crocodile fat from the farm, Sweet went about rendering it into an oil.
“It was just an oil and we tested it here on people in Schoenies and I found it was healing all sorts of things, from acne to athletes foot,” he said.
The product is also said to help cure eczema, cold sores, blisters, ring worm and sun spots or solar keratosis. And it cures mange in dogs and is described as “ideal for horse wounds”.
After enlisting the help of a local herbalist who converted the oil into a balm and added essential oils such as vitamin E and omega, word of mouth sales of the product saw it go from being sold at just one local pharmacy to more than 700 around the country. “Tourists started buying it and taking it abroad and word of mouth spread there too,” said Sweet.
“So now we have distributors in the UK, the US, New Zealand, Scandinavia and Namibia.”
