Renier van Rooyen: Pep Stores founder 1931-2018
Visionary retail pioneer who sharply criticised apartheid
● Renier van Rooyen, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 86, started Pep Stores in one of the remotest towns in SA with little more than a R1,000 loan and a matric, and built it into the country’s most successful clothing retail empire.
From the beginning he defied apartheid laws and his stores, many in extremely conservative towns, were islands of nonracism with no segregation of any kind.
He was one of the first prominent Afrikaner business leaders to publicly condemn apartheid. On one celebrated occasion he clashed with then education minister FW de Klerk at a social event, taking him to task over the Group Areas Act, forced removals and segregated schools.
When, 15 years later, De Klerk did his about-turn, Van Rooyen wondered why it had taken him “so long to come round to the reality of a nonracial SA without white and Afrikaner domination”.
He said the highlight of his life was a 30-minute private meeting with Nelson Mandela in 2008. What would he like to drink, Mandela asked. “Tea or Cuban rum?”
He was one of the first major private philanthropists in SA, shelling out R500,000 (worth R50m today) from his own pocket in 1974 to start a community development foundation which is still going. It was chaired by SA’s future ambassador to the US, Franklin Sonn, and the poet and antiapartheid activist Adam Small was an executive director. Its offices were bombed in 1989 by, it was believed, security forces.
Van Rooyen also funded numerous welfare projects out of his own pocket, including a mobile soup kitchen which fed 6,000 black and coloured children every day. He was distressed by the “real poverty and misery which goes unchallenged around us”, he said.
“The government is doing far too little to help the poor and destitute,” he said in a Sunday Times interview in 1974. In a speech to the junior Afrikaans chamber of commerce in 1972 he said the greatest challenge facing young businesspeople in SA was “the elimination of racial discrimination”. He pleaded for the creation of “a common South African nationhood”, and told them to use their influence “to remove things which are so offensive and hateful”.
In another speech, in 1973, he stressed the need to “eliminate all measures that harm the dignity of black and brown people”.
“There are things in our country which must be made right, and they must not be brushed aside by political trickery.”
It took considerable courage for any business leader, let alone an Afrikaans business leader, to say things like this.
He did so consistently.
Van Rooyen was born in the small Northern Cape town of Kenhardt on November 28 1931. His father worked a small plot which kept the family alive. In 1941 the local river flooded and they were left homeless.
They had no insurance and received no government assistance.
His dad drank himself to death soon after and his mother supported the family by making and selling clothes.
His two older brothers got jobs and put him through school. At 17 he became a clerk in the magistrate’s court.
With financial assistance from his former principal he went to Stellenbosch University but left after a few months when the money ran out. He got a job as a secretary and buyer at a Tungsten mine in Upington, which taught him vital lessons about business.
At 20, with a loan from a sympathetic farmer, he opened his own accounting business, which helped farmers with tax returns and bookkeeping and supplied them with equipment like windmills and wire.
He supplemented his income as a parttime messenger of the court, issuing summonses. He said this gave him insight into the perils of buying and selling on credit.
A £500 (R1,000) loan helped him buy a small general dealership in 1955 and he turned it into a shop that sold clothes cheaper than anyone else. For cash. Eliminating credit was the secret of his success, he said. Sales and profits grew and he roped in his wife and friends to help out.
He drove to Cape Town several times a month, filled his car with stock and had it on the shelves next morning after a 20-hour round trip.
In 1957 he converted his store into a private company called Bargain Stores. His business model was low-cost clothes, shoes, textiles and low overheads. He ascribed his success to this and an insistence on quality.
Pep’s sales philosophy was: “We do not sell cheap goods, we sell goods cheaply.” His target market would punish him severely if he sold them junk, he said. “Poor people are not stupid. They cannot afford to be.”
The stores spread rapidly but apartheid laws and attitudes were a constant problem.
It was a battle getting some white town councils, Paarl was an example, to grant him a business licence. Most of his customers were black and coloured people and councils complained about them flooding their white CBDs.
He introduced self-service, encouraging shoppers to touch and try on. He refused to have separate cubicles, toilets or queues for his black and white customers, and this also led to frequent clashes with the authorities.
In 1965 he changed the company’s name to Pep Stores. In 1967 a young Christo Wiese, who knew him from a family connection, became company secretary and his deputy.
In 1969 he rejected a R4m offer from Edgars. By 1970 Pep Stores was the fastestgrowing clothing retailer in the country, and he was getting media attention. In 1972 he listed Pep on the JSE and appointed Whitey Basson as his financial director.
In 1979, against the advice of analysts, he bought a small eight-store food retailer called Shoprite for R1.9m. They warned it would be gobbled up by Checkers, OK and Pick n Pay. He put Basson in charge and Shoprite did the gobbling.
In 1981, at the height of his success and at only 49, he sold out to Wiese, keeping 200,000 shares and pocketing R7m. The business world was stunned.
“I’m just tired,” he said. In 27 years he’d grown Pep to 500 stores, 10 factories and 12,000 employees. Its turnover was close to R300m, its market cap R70m.
In 1985, after PW Botha’s disastrous Rubicon speech, he emigrated and spent 10 years living in Portugal and England and taking tennis lessons in the south of France.
The Afrikaans media, which saw him as a traitor, howled that he was leading the “chicken run” from SA. An SABC interviewer demanded: “Why leave SA now, having lived off the fat of the land for so long?”
He returned in 1996 to help build the “new SA”, he said. At the age of 65 he started Harwill, an investment company which ploughed hundreds of millions into manufacturing medical and plastics products for the local and export market.
In 2000 it was liquidated. He was wiped out financially and thrown upon the welfare of friends. Fortunately, two of them were Wiese and Basson who, thanks to his success with Pep Stores, were not short of cash.
Van Rooyen is survived by his wife Alice and three children.