Phil Viljoen

Bio

Wildlife Thread Artist, Phil Viljoen has been in the Embroidery, Dressmaking and Digitizing industry for more than 17 years. He is founder and president of 3 businesses. Embird Online South Africa, (teaching digitizing internationally through web seminars), Pricing for Profit (providing training and assistance in business startups for the Embroidery, Dressmaking and Digitizing industry around the globe) and Host in SA, where he teaches website development and web hosting with a strong emphasis on PHP programming and membership based developments Philip matriculated in 1975 and received his AICB (SA) diploma in Management Accounting in 1993.and FIAB (UK) in 1995. He started his first business in 1986 in Ellisras, "Le Rags" trading in second hand clothing, with 50c in the till on opening day and sold the business 18 months later for R 15,000.00. Philip worked as a pattern consultant with his wife Jacqui and traveled South Africa and Namibia presenting seminars and workshops in the sewing and dressmaking field. He has written articles and programs on starting and running a home based dressmaking, embroidery and digitizing business. During 1991 we lost almost everything. My company that is was working for transferred me twice in 6 months and we ended up in the small town Witbank in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa. I still had my job but Jacqui's printing business was bankrupt. I signed surety for everything and therefore we lost all our belongings. Being of entrepreneurial spirits we decided that this was the time for a new start. Jacqui started her dressmaking career and I started programming and developing software, we kept the pot going this way. The amount of hours that she spend sewing was horrendous. Some nights I would say good night to her at 24:00 and find her still in her sewing room at 07:00 the next morning.