After working in Germany for Oliver Sport & Squash GmbH, as their sales representative for Northern Gernany for about 10 years, I decided to retire from my two jobs as squash coach in Hamburg and sales representative and return to live in beautiful Cape Town. After living the typical life of a retired gentleman for a couple of years, I became bored with this and decided to look for a challenge. I contacted Jürgen and suggested that I introduce the Oliver Brand to South Africa. He readily agreed and sent me five squash racquet model samples and some replacement grips. My decision to introduce Oliver to the South African sport market was definately the right one!!

I now import 15 different squash racquet models, some tennis and occasionally small quantities of badminton racquets. Badminton is not very popular here. In addition to these products, I import bags, squash strings, different grips, safety glasses and protective tapes etc (of course all Oliver products!)

As I live in Cape Town and play squash at Western Province Cricket Club (See our homepage www.wpcc.co.za), the shop in this club was my very first customer. I am now happy to report that I have customers all over South Africa and my turnover has doubled year after year. It is most encouraging that people I have never heard of previously in this or that squash club or sports shop, phone or mail me, saying that customers are asking for Oliver equipment. The Orca and Orca 2 racquets are really causing a small sensation here and I must congratulate Jürgen and his team for introducing this revolutionary racquet into the range. It has become my best seller by far.

Although it was quite emotional for me to resign from the German Oliver team and leave all my faithfull north German customers, I now happily feel, once again part of the Oliver team and that my efforts here are contributing in some small way to the success of Oliver.

Report from Howie Blumenthal
Oliver South Africa
Cape Town