Chantel Green has spent nearly twenty years building a case for staying a curated boutique by design.
She started out as a school teacher. At a party, a friend watching her run the room like a production told her she’d be good in the production industry. Chantel didn’t know what that meant, so she took a gap year to do a deep dive to find out.
She went on to work as a freelance production manager and a model booker before founding Lustre Global with her partner in 2017: a production house and creative agency built around a small, deliberately chosen roster of South African photographers, directors and artists.
Lustre calls itself a production partner, not a production company, and the distinction is the whole business. Most of the industry, Chantel says, runs on facilitation: a client arrives with a brief, gets matched with crew and locations, and leaves without ever really using the depth of talent the country actually has. Lustre is built to close that gap, one lasting relationship at a time. Some of its client relationships now run from eight, to ten, to twelve years.
“I actually quite prefer keeping it boutique, having the time to really curate the business I’m doing, versus quantity and evenly spread.”
Founder Chantel Green
Today, Lustre Global is female-founded, female-owned and female-run, in an industry Chantel entered at a time when women were largely kept to coordinator roles. Her explanation for why that matters is characteristically direct: “I think girls do it better.” Crew who started as equipment drivers are now production managers. A young photographer who once hiked for hours through the night to make early call times, because he had no transport, is now shooting major advertising campaigns after coming through Lustre’s RISE program.
The episode goes deeper on the commercial reality behind all of this. What it actually costs to turn down growth that doesn’t fit, and the office in Dubai and the opportunity in Portugal that never happened because COVID got there first. Why “kryptonite,” in Chantel’s own words, is a client who thinks a deposit buys the right to disrespect her crew, and what she’s done about it when it happens. How Cape Town holds its own and more against industry cities like London and LA on crew quality, work ethic, locations and cost.
There’s also a moment, talking about what changed her approach to growth, that has nothing to do with production at all.
“I realised I was human.”
Chantel Green
The full episode is live now. Go listen.
About Lustre Global
Chantel Green is a founder of Lustre Global, a production house and creative agency based in Cape Town, South Africa. Lustre represents a small, curated roster of South African photographers, directors and artists, working as a production partner rather than a production facilitator across the advertising and fashion sectors, locally and internationally. The company is female-founded, female-owned and female-run.
Website: lustre.global
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Founded: 2017
Industry: Production house / creative agency - advertising and fashion
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