Myer Brand Guidelines: Bendigo 1900, the Bourke Street Emporium & Six Christmas Windows

Two brothers and a gold-rush town.

Myer began in Bendigo, the central Victorian gold-rush city, on 1 November 1900. English Wikipedia says Sidney Myer, who had migrated from Belarus to Melbourne in 1899 with little money and little English, joined his elder brother Elcon Myer, and the two opened their first store in the town; a second Bendigo store followed in 1908. The Daily Aus, in an explainer published on 30 October 2026, gives the same two brothers, the same town and the same year.

The move to the state capital came in 1911, when Myer bought the drapery business of Wright and Neil in Bourke Street, Melbourne, near the General Post Office. A new building opened there in 1914, designed by the architects HW & FB Tompkins, who went on to design the extensions of the next two decades, English Wikipedia says. The company bought neighbouring sites and old businesses such as Robertson & Moffat and Stephens & Sons, and the growing complex became known as the Myer Emporium. A Lonsdale Street frontage followed in the 1920s, and the Bourke Street front was rebuilt in 1933. In 1918 the company also bought the Doveton woollen mills at Ballarat, and from 1928 a despatch building in Queensberry Street sent trucks of goods ordered by telephone out to the suburbs.

Growth beyond Melbourne came largely by buying established local stores. English Wikipedia lists a controlling interest in Marshall’s of Adelaide in 1925, Morris Jacobs of Geelong in 1950, McWhirters of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1955, Allan & Stark in 1959, Farmers & Co in Sydney in 1961, the Sydney chain Grace Bros in 1983 and Boans, the Western Australian chain, in 1984. In 1968 Myer bought Lindsay’s stores in Geelong and renamed the business Target, positioning it as a discount department store chain.

Coles Myer, private owners and the ASX.

In 1985 the Myer Emporium, together with Target, merged with GJ Coles & Coy to form Coles Myer; Myer stayed a distinct business inside the group. The Grace Bros stores in New South Wales kept their own name for two more decades and were renamed Myer on 13 February 2004, English Wikipedia says. The Myer One loyalty programme followed in August 2004.

Coles Myer sold the department store chain in 2006. The sale to a consortium controlled by the US private-equity group Newbridge Capital, which included the Myer family, was announced on 13 March and completed on 2 June 2006. The new owners moved head office back to the city centre, and the Bourke Street store was later rebuilt: the redeveloped store became the company’s flagship, the old Lonsdale Street store closed, and head office moved to Docklands, English Wikipedia says.

Myer returned to public ownership when it listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on 2 November 2009; The Daily Aus also dates the listing to 2009. Since then it has bought fashion labels: a majority of Sass & Bide in 2011 and the rest in October 2013, and Marcs and David Lawrence in 2017, after both had gone into voluntary administration. In October 2024 Myer agreed to buy the Apparel Brands division of Premier Investments, which runs Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans and Dotti as well as Jacqui E, and the brands joined the group in January 2025 after shareholders approved the deal, English Wikipedia says; The Daily Aus dates the purchase to early 2025. In August 2025 the Myer One programme was extended to those chains.

The store network has been reshaped several times. English Wikipedia counts 56 Myer stores across Australia as of April 2024, with the national flagship in the Bourke Street Mall. Myer also ran a mail-order business, Myer Direct, from 1989 until it was sold in January 2002, and in December 2017 it opened an online marketplace, The Myer Market, alongside its own website.

How Australian and New Zealand retailers present themselves.

Australian and New Zealand department, discount and specialty retailers present themselves first through the shop front. Many chains grew by buying older local stores and then putting their own name over the door, so a single fascia in a city mall or a regional town often carries several earlier businesses behind it. Myer, for example, renamed the Grace Bros stores of New South Wales in 2004, two decades after buying the chain. Store names are usually plain: a founder’s surname, a description of what is sold, or a short set of initials.

The calendar does much of the talking. Department stores mark Christmas with window displays, and in Melbourne the Myer windows on Bourke Street have been documented by State Library Victoria since their start in 1956. Discount and specialty chains lean instead on printed and online catalogues, seasonal sales with their own names and colour-coded sale signs, published on the companies’ own channels. Loyalty programmes, cards and apps carry the same name and colours as the stores.

Own-label ranges sit beside the brands a retailer stocks. Many groups sell products under house names, or own fashion and homewares labels that also trade as separate shops, and present them in their own sections of the store and website. A pattern, a single colour or a capitalised wordmark often does the work of recognition: David Jones adopted a black-and-white houndstooth in 1967 so that its packaging would not need the name.

Behind the fascias sit corporate pages. These usually give a founding story and name the founders, the parent group and, for listed companies, the exchange and investor pages with dated announcements. Changes of owner, administrations and store closures appear there and in the business press, which is often the clearest record of how a shop name has passed from one owner to the next.

Six windows on Bourke Street.

Myer’s most public piece of design is not a logo but a row of shop windows. A State Library Victoria article published in December 2018 credits the Christmas windows to Fred Asmussen, who joined the Myer Emporium in 1928 as a “wheeler” boy moving goods around the store and was in charge of the Bourke Street windows by 1939. In 1956, the year Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games, he persuaded management to let him build a grand Christmas display with very little merchandise in it, under the theme “Santa and the Olympics.” The response led to a series of six windows the following November on The Nutcracker, then Aladdin in 1958 and fairy tales in 1959.

The library describes a year-long process that needed carpenters, engineers, artists, scenery makers, costume designers and sound technicians, and early improvisation with chicken wire, papier-mâché, hidden magnets and motors taken from household machines to drive the moving figures. Themes followed the news and local books: Santa went to space in 1962, Peg Maltby’s illustrated fairy tales filled the windows in 1976, and May Gibbs’ Gumnut Babies in 1995. The library holds the Coles Myer archive, more than 30,000 items, as well as photographs of the windows by Lloyd Hull, who recorded them for nearly forty years; in 2018 it lent items to Melbourne Museum for the exhibition Make Believe: The Story of the Myer Christmas Windows.

Advertising has moved between positions. The trade publication Mumbrella reported in October 2018 that Myer was bringing back its “My Store” campaign, four years after the retailer and its creative agency, Clemenger BBDO, had moved away from the “Myer is My Store” line towards a more aspirational “find wonderful” message. The name itself is stylised in capitals, as MYER, English Wikipedia notes.

For a design guide, Myer shows a retailer whose public face rests on a founder’s surname over the door, a flagship on one Melbourne street and a Christmas display tradition that the State Library treats as part of the city’s history. Compare it with David Jones, its main department store rival, and with Harvey Norman, another Australian retail name built on founders’ names. For this guide we use a window red, a deep ink, a warm cream and a muted gold with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Myer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.