Ackermans Brand Guidelines: Gus Ackerman’s 1916 Wynberg Shop and a Pepkor Value Chain

One shop in a Cape Town suburb.

Ackermans traces its start to 1916, when Gus Ackerman opened a shop in Wynberg, a suburb in the southern part of Cape Town, English Wikipedia says. The chain still carries his surname more than a century later, and its job has stayed broadly the same: clothing and everyday essentials for families, sold at value prices. Pepkor, its owner today, describes the brand on its own website as aimed mainly at mothers shopping for themselves and their children.

The business changed hands several times before it settled in its present group. English Wikipedia says it was sold to the department-store group Greatermans in 1960, and then to Edgars in 1970, which kept it as a discount chain beside its own department stores. In 1984 Pepkor, the Cape Town group built around the PEP chain, acquired Ackermans; English Wikipedia gives its size at the time as 34 stores across the country.

Growth under Pepkor came steadily rather than all at once. By the turn of the century the chain had passed 200 stores across southern Africa, and by the end of the 2002/03 financial year it had 284, according to English Wikipedia. Its head office is in Kuils River, on the eastern side of Cape Town, and it trades in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini as well as in South Africa. English Wikipedia says that as of 2024 the chain operated more than 1,000 stores.

That history connects Ackermans with two other South African retail names. Its years under Edgars tie it to the department-store chain that opened its first store in Johannesburg in 1929, and its parent since 1984 is the group that grew out of PEP, which English Wikipedia dates to 1965.

Kidswear first, then womenswear formats and menswear.

For most of its history Ackermans has been a family-clothing store with children’s wear at its centre, and Pepkor still reports on the chain in those terms. In its results for the year to September 2025, Pepkor said Ackermans had gained share in the kids category and had expanded into menswear, Moneyweb reported in November 2025. English Wikipedia describes it as the chain’s first move into the menswear market, alongside ranges that already ran from babywear to womenswear.

The chain has also tried separate store formats under its own name. Pepkor set up Ackermans Woman as a standalone womenswear store; Moneyweb reported in May 2022 that the format had grown from 26 stores in 2020, and that Pepkor described it as successful and ready to grow from a base of 35 stores. The same article said Pepkor had launched Ackermans Connect, a cellular-focused format, in 2021, opening four stores that year. Over the two years before that report, the main Ackermans chain had grown its store base by between 2% and 5% a year, a pace it shared with PEP and PEP Cell, Moneyweb said.

Ackermans has expanded alongside its sister chain inside the group. Between April 2020 and March 2021, Pepkor opened 65 new PEP and Ackermans stores, and the two chains together made up more than 3,000 of the group’s stores in southern Africa, Moneyweb reported in April 2021, citing the group’s trading statement on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Pepkor said then that retail space in the two chains had grown by 2.6% year on year, while the group’s overall retail space had shrunk, and that store openings had focused on the most robust and proven brands in the group.

Lay-by, the practice of paying for goods in instalments before collecting them, is part of how the chain sells. In September 2026 Pepkor said Ackermans had been affected by lower lay-by sales and by low levels of price inflation, and that it had introduced several merchandise initiatives to improve product execution, Business Day reported.

How South African retailers present themselves.

South African retailers meet most of their customers in shopping centres, high streets and filling-station forecourts, so the store fascia does much of the identity work. A single group often runs several formats under related names, from large food halls and hypermarkets to small convenience shops and standalone clothing or liquor stores, and the name above the door usually tells the shopper which format they have walked into.

Own-label ranges carry the brand inside the store. Grocers and fashion chains sell food, clothing and homeware under their own names or under house labels, so the same letters, colours and type appear on shelf tickets, packaging, carrier bags and staff uniforms as well as on the shopfront. Loyalty cards and store cards extend that identity into wallets and phone apps.

Campaign graphics follow the retail calendar. Weekly specials, seasonal catalogues and back-to-school, holiday and sporting promotions are published in print, in store and online, and the companies’ own websites keep many of those leaflets and campaign pages available to browse. For a designer, these are the plainest record of how a chain uses its palette and type at speed.

The corporate side is just as public. Many of the large South African chains are listed on the JSE, and their investor websites publish annual reports, results presentations and history pages that name founders, parent groups, acquisitions and listing dates. Store counts and country lists in those reports are dated to a financial year, so they describe the business at that moment rather than for all time.

A value chain inside a much larger group.

Ackermans’ parent has changed shape around it. Steinhoff International acquired Pepkor in November 2014, and Pepkor was listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in September 2017, English Wikipedia says. It adds that the shareholder Ibex Topco B.V. cut its stake from 50% to 43.89% in February 2023 and to 30.18% by September 2024, and that by July 2025 its holding had fallen to zero after subsidiaries sold their stakes.

Today Ackermans is one of a long list of chains inside the group, alongside names such as PEP, Shoe City, Tekkie Town and Refinery. In November 2025 Pepkor completed its purchase of the Legit, Swagga, Style and Boardmans businesses from Retailability, adding 469 stores, Moneyweb reported; Pepkor’s own footprint passed 6,000 stores during its 2025 financial year, the same publication reported, and Business Day reported in September 2026 that the group had ended the first ten months of its 2026 financial year with 6,677 stores.

Inside that much larger group, Ackermans keeps a distinct place. In its 2021 trading update Pepkor described PEP and Ackermans as its brands in the discount and value segments of the market, Moneyweb reported, and the two chains account for most of the group’s revenue, the same article said. Ackermans also runs its own womenswear and cellular formats beside its main stores.

For a design guide, Ackermans shows how a founder’s surname can carry a value chain through more than a century of changing owners. Compare PEP, its sister chain inside Pepkor, and Edgars, which owned it in the 1970s. For this guide we use deep teal, warm coral and soft cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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