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Operational Review – Truworths
- Market-leading brand portfolio
- Aspirational fashion
- Supply chain
- Account management
- Retail presence
- Human capital
Market-Leading brand portfolio–Truworths
Truworths owns a portfolio of market-leading fashion clothing and footwear brands. These brands are mainly exclusive to Truworths and include ladieswear, menswear and kidswear. Together they target the many lifestyle needs of our customers, who are youthful, fashionable South Africans.
Brands are premium quality, aspirational and focus on an exclusive blend of colour, fabric and fashion styling.
A range of beauty products are offered including fragrances, skincare and make-up products from many of the world’s leading international brands. This is housed in the Elements department within the store environment.
Exclusively designed fine jewellery, sunglasses and watches are offered, along with a range of mobile products.
The business also owns a premium homeware brand.
BRAND STRATEGY
Core to Truworths’ brand strategy is the focus on continuing to grow and develop exclusive and highly sought-after in-house brands. These brands are complemented by a small collection of specialist third-party licensed brands.
Each brand in the Truworths portfolio has a clearly defined profile and a statement of the brand 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 brand profiles guide the merchandise buying teams in their product selection process and also determine how the brands are visually presented in stores and windows, as well as in print and digital marketing.
Truworths constantly reviews its brand portfolio to identify new merchandise opportunities across the customer spectrum and during the past year developed two new apparel brands, Fuel and Primark.
Expanding brand portfolio
Truworths and Truworths Man are the core brands. They 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), Uzzi (2006), Earthaddict, Earthchild and Naartjie (2015) and Hey Betty (2011).
Emporium stores include several other sub-brands which are essential to the variety of lifestyles that the company offers to satisfy customers’ needs. These include well-established brands 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 market. The chain operates from stand-alone stores. ID Kids was introduced in 2019, offering boys’ and girls’ collections.
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 and apparel.
Context was introduced in 2019 to offer a range of exclusive Truworths fashion, beauty and homeware for discerning female customers.
The most recent extensions to the brand portfolio, Fuel and Primark, were launched in 2021.
Fuel is a young masculine fashion brand with a streetwear edge targeting a cool urban aesthetic.
Primark targets the value segment of the South African fashion market, with an aspirational offering of commercial fashion for young men and women at quality which is excellent for the price.
Expansion through acquisition
Organic expansion of the brand portfolio has been complemented by the acquisition of the following specialist brands:
Young
Designers
Emporium (YDE) (2003)
Italian-inspired menswear
brand Uzzi
(2006)
Ladieswear
brand
Earthaddict
(2015)
Kidswear brands Earthchild and Naartjie (2015)
Office UK
(2015)
Homeware
and linen retailer
Loads of Living (2017)
Specialist brand emporium stores
The Truworths Emporium store enables customers to shop for Truworths’ multiple fashion brands in a single location. The emporium store concept has evolved with the expansion of the brand portfolio and customers have access to four specialist branded emporiums within the Truworths Emporium:
The Truworths portfolio of brands and specialist branded emporium stores offers an enticement to youthful and fashionable consumers to shop for quality apparel merchandise of international styling and standard.
