Big W Brand Guidelines: A 1964 Jesmond Store, a 1976 Tamworth Relaunch & 178 Stores

A department store name that came back as a discount chain.

Big W is the discount department store chain of Woolworths Group, the Australian supermarket company, and its own name explains the link: the W stands for Woolworths. The retailer said so itself in November 2020, in a LinkedIn post written after videos on TikTok asking about the letter drew close to half a million views, the fashion trade paper Ragtrader reported on 24 November 2020.

In that post, quoted by Ragtrader, Big W said its name “originated in 1964” with the opening of its first store in the Jesmond Shopping Centre in Newcastle, New South Wales, which it described as the first shopping centre Woolworths developed. Those early Big W stores were department stores, it said, comparable to Myer and Grace Bros, and they reflected Woolworths’ roots in the general merchandise and variety trade. English Wikipedia says that at the time Woolworths still ran several hundred Woolworths Variety stores, the original format of the business.

The name did not last in its first form. English Wikipedia says that in 1970 the Big W name stopped being used and the stores became Woolworths Family Centres, which combined a large general merchandise range with a supermarket food range, and which were converted to supermarkets in the 1980s.

The Big W that exists today dates from 1976. Woolworths Group’s own history page says the first Big W discount department store opened in Tamworth, in northern New South Wales, that year, and that by the end of 1978 there were 13 Big W discount stores across all five mainland states and the Australian Capital Territory. Big W’s 2020 post, as Ragtrader reported it, called the Tamworth store the first in the format it still trades in. English Wikipedia adds that the separation of Big W from the Woolworths supermarkets was largely complete by 1989.

Own brands, small stores and a marketplace.

Big W sells mainly general merchandise: English Wikipedia lists clothing, health and beauty, bedding, kitchenware, toys, books, home entertainment, small appliances and pet items, sold both in stores and online. Woolworths places the chain in its W Living segment, alongside the pet retailer Petstock, according to the group’s full-year results announcement to the ASX on 26 August 2026.

That announcement names some of Big W’s own brands. It credits growth in own-brand sales to Somersault in toys, Openook in home and to Big W’s clothing, which it linked to the chain’s investment in design and sourcing. The same document describes a value campaign called Big Price Drops, launched in April 2026, and a price reset in health and beauty later in the financial year.

The store estate has been tested in several directions. English Wikipedia says Big W opened its first party store at Rouse Hill Town Centre in New South Wales in August 2014, citing the company. It also says, citing the trade title Appliance Retailer, that Big W opened its first small-format store at Town Hall in central Sydney in August 2022. Some services have gone: English Wikipedia says in-store photo printing was phased out in 2022 and that garden centres, a feature of the modern stores from 1976, were retired, with live plants dropped from around 2023.

Online, Big W launched Big W Market, a marketplace for third-party sellers, in November 2023, English Wikipedia says, citing Nine News. Woolworths’ August 2026 announcement says Big W Market was folded into Big W during the first half of the 2026 financial year, and now reports the two together.

Woolworths Group’s history page also notes that when the group stopped handing out plastic checkout bags nationwide from 20 June 2018, the change covered Big W stores as well as its supermarkets.

How the category presents itself.

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.

A separate system inside a supermarket group.

In recent years Woolworths has been giving Big W more of its own infrastructure. With its results in August 2025, the group said it had begun a process to unlock Big W from Woolworths Group technology platforms so the chain could run systems suited to a discount department store, iTnews reported on 27 August 2025. Chief executive Amanda Bardwell told the market that the group wanted Big W to have “the appropriate foundations to be successful,” the publication quoted her as saying. iTnews added that Big W had been part of the group’s move of its SAP applications to Microsoft Azure in 2022.

The Nightly, reporting on the same results on 27 August 2025, said Bardwell described Big W’s performance as “very disappointing”. A year later, Woolworths’ August 2026 announcement said work on moving Big W to a standalone systems platform was continuing.

As of 28 June 2026, Woolworths reported 178 Big W stores, against 179 a year earlier and 176 in 2022, according to the five-year store table in its results announcement. English Wikipedia gives the head office as Bella Vista, in north-west Sydney. The company writes its name in capitals as “BIG W” in its own documents; this guide follows the more common “Big W.”

For a designer, the story is mostly about naming. A single initial carries the parent brand inside the chain’s name, a link the retailer had to explain to shoppers in 2020, while the shop formats around it have changed from department store to discount store, party store, small city store and online marketplace.

For a design guide, Big W shows how a retailer can hold a short, letter-based name steady while its formats keep changing around it. Compare Myer, the Melbourne department store group the early Big W stores were likened to, and The Warehouse, a discount general merchandise chain across the Tasman. For this guide we use a deep blue, white and a warm yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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