Market-Leading brand portfolio – Truworths

Truworths owns an enviable portfolio of market-leading fashion clothing and footwear brands, offering some of South Africa’s most sought-after ladieswear, menswear and kidswear, and in addition owns a premium homeware brand.

Truworths’ brand strategy

Truworths offers customers premium-quality fashion ranges of an international standard across a diversified portfolio of aspirational brands that appeal to the different lifestyles of youthful, fashionable South Africans. In addition, the business also has a strong and growing kidswear offering and a premium homeware brand.

Core to Truworths’ brand strategy is the focus on continuing to grow and develop exclusive and highly sought-after in-house brands. Collectively these brands account for the majority of the brand offering and are complemented by a small collection of specialist third-party licensed brands.

Major international fragrance and cosmetics brands are offered in a uniquely curated environment, Elements. Truworths in addition offers fashionable fine jewellery, sunglasses and watches, comprising exclusively designed merchandise as well as leading fashion brands, and also offers a range of cellular devices.

Each brand in the Truworths portfolio has a clearly defined profile and a documented description of the DNA which ensures the merchandise has a distinctive signature. The portfolio of brands then comes together across lifestyles to create a unique and compelling customer offering. These descriptions are used by the merchandise buying teams to guide them in their product selection process and in how the brands are visually presented in stores, windows and digitally.

Truworths constantly reviews its portfolio of brands to identify new merchandise opportunities across the customer spectrum.

Expanding brand portfolio

Truworths and Truworths Man are the core brands and are supported by a range of internally developed mainstream brands that make up the emporium:

• Inwear (launched in 1986)
• Truworths Jewellery (1989)
• LTD (1992)
• Truworths Elements (1999)
• Ginger Mary (2004)
• Hey Betty (2011)

Within the emporium many other smaller brands exist. These brands are critical to the variety of lifestyles that the company offers to satisfy its customers’ needs. These include some particularly well-established brands such as Outback Red, Hemisphere, Finnigans, Skiny, TRS, Trench and TRNY.

Daniel Hechter, the French designer brand, has been offered under an exclusive long-term licence agreement since 1984.

Identity, launched in 1999, offers a range of young, affordable and trendy merchandise for the fashion-aware and value-conscious youth and kids market. The chain only operates from stand-alone stores.

Office London, the South African offering of the UK fashion footwear brand owned by the Group, was launched in 2017. The brand offers a wide selection of third-party branded athleisure footwear complemented by a limited selection of in-house designed own-brand fashion footwear and apparel.

Organic expansion of the brand portfolio has been complemented by the acquisition of the following brands:

• Italian-inspired menswear brand Uzzi (2006)
• Ladieswear brand Earthaddict (2015)
• Kidswear brands Earthchild and Naartjie (2015)
• Homeware and linen retailer Loads of Living (2017)

In 2003 the Group acquired Young Designers Emporium (YDE), an agency business showcasing clothing, footwear and accessory brands of emerging fashion designers in South Africa. YDE operates from stand-alone stores and is not included in emporium stores as the brand targets a different customer profile to Truworths.