CHANTAL SMUTS

Chantal has run her own multi-award-winning corporate publishing business, The Creative Store, for 21 years. Large clients have included Sanlam and The City of Cape Town.

She is a strategist, writer, editor and publication manager and designer with a passion for effective and spot-on communication. That translates into carefully crafted words meshed with good design to offer accessibility, understanding and engagement to target readers.
Her varied early career involved secondary school teaching in art and English, graphic design, writing and print broking. Those skills came perfectly together in publication production, and a lifelong love story began.

Chantal held directorships at two top strategic communications companies in Johannesburg and Cape Town from 1991 to 2001. She resigned to be her own boss, who’s tough, but real and dislikes arrogance, posturing and time-wasting meetings. Her one-person show – she makes the coffee too — outsources to other highly-skilled professionals in the field for complex projects. But she thoroughly enjoys mentoring young communicators and designers in any team involved.

She’s an avid (Kindle-free) reader, an advanced Toastmaster, and an advocate for environmental issues, early childhood development and, as a survivor, breast cancer awareness. As a small-scale beekeeper, she gets great delight from caring for her ‘Girls’, who keep her humbled by their extraordinary genetic smarts.

She is fascinated by the fast-changing nature of effective communication but has an unswerving belief in the endurance of print on paper, specifically in terms of reaching every level of a corporate audience.

Chantal feels that any publication, in any form, no matter how serious the topic, needs an element of joy to be engaging. Her default stress-management advice: “Life is an endless learning curve; feel the joy of the journey and don’t take yourself too seriously”.