Clicks Brand Guidelines: Jack Goldin’s 1968 Cape Town Drugstore, ClubCard & Pharmacies

A drugstore idea, without the drugs.

Clicks opened its doors on 6 August 1968 on St George’s Street in Cape Town, the company’s history page says, and English Wikipedia gives the same date and place. Its founder was Jack Goldin. According to the International Directory of Company Histories, Goldin had already built a retail career in the 1960s that included four small Cape Town grocery stores trading as Pick n Pay, which he sold to Raymond Ackerman in 1967; that sale gave him the means to start something of his own.

What Goldin wanted, the Directory says, was an American-style drugstore: health and beauty goods, over-the-counter medicines and general merchandise alongside a dispensing pharmacy. South African law at the time did not allow companies to own retail dispensing pharmacies, so the pharmacy half of the idea had to wait. The company’s own history puts it plainly: the dream of a Clicks pharmacy was realised only 35 years later. In the meantime Goldin built what the Directory calls a drugstore without the drugs.

The chain left the Western Cape in 1971, with a store on West Street in Durban, according to both the company and English Wikipedia. Goldin took the business public as Clicks Stores Limited on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1979, when it ran 31 stores, the Directory says, and by the middle of the 1980s it had passed 50. In 1984 it bought Diskom, an 11-store health and beauty chain that it renamed Discom.

Ownership then changed several times. Trevor Honeysett arrived as managing director in 1987; Goldin sold control to the Score Food Group in 1988 and stayed on as chairman until 1991, when he resigned and moved to Australia, where he joined the Priceline pharmacy chain. The Premier Group took control of Clicks in 1992, and in 1995 the company was sold to Malbak, which set up a holding company called New Clicks Holdings. New Clicks was relisted in 1996, and when Malbak sold its shareholding in 1997 the company became independent again, the Directory says.

Music, Australia, and then the pharmacy.

For a time Clicks was more than a health and beauty chain. In 1992 it bought Musica, a music retailer, and in 1997 it added Compact Disc Wherehouse, later turned into Musica Megastores. It also looked abroad: in 1998 New Clicks bought the Priceline chain in Australia, by then about 70 stores, and later added the House homewares franchise and the Price Attack hair-care network there, according to the Directory. In 2001 it took the South African franchise for The Body Shop; the company says its opening Body Shop store in Africa was in Sandton City, Johannesburg.

The turn towards pharmacy came with a change in the law. Expecting reform, New Clicks bought the wholesaler United Pharmaceutical Distributors (UPD) — in 2002, according to the Directory, while the company and English Wikipedia give 2003. When legislation allowing corporate ownership of dispensing pharmacies was passed in 2003, Clicks began converting stores to a Clicks Pharmacy format and bought the pharmacy group PM&A. The opening Clicks pharmacy traded from Sea Point, Cape Town, in 2004, and the 100th dispensary opened in July 2006, the Directory says. To concentrate on that business at home, New Clicks sold its Australian operations in a management buyout.

Two other pieces of the brand date from these years. The ClubCard loyalty programme began in 1995, according to the company and English Wikipedia; members earn cash back on purchases. And own-label goods arrived under the “You Pay Less” name, the company says. Its private-label ranges now include Payless, Safeway, Made4Baby and SunProtect, Business Day reported in April 2025, when chief executive Bertina Engelbrecht said many of those products are made in South Africa.

In 2009 New Clicks Holdings renamed itself Clicks Group Limited, and its listing moved to the Food and Drug Retailers sector of the exchange, the company says. Its head office is in Woodstock, Cape Town.

Malls, fascias and own labels.

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 store network, a wholesaler and a card.

Today Clicks Group runs several businesses under one roof. Besides the Clicks chain, English Wikipedia lists UPD, the wholesaler that supplies hospitals, clinics and independent pharmacies as well as the group’s own stores; The Body Shop franchise; the Sorbet beauty brand; the M-Kem pharmacies; and Clicks Baby stores, launched in 2021. The company says it sold Sorbet products before 2013, when it took a quarter of the newly formed Sorbet Brands, and that it bought all of the Sorbet businesses in 2023. It also sells GNC supplements and Claire’s accessories under franchise agreements, its history page says.

Store counts change quickly and need their dates. In April 2025 Bizcommunity reported that Clicks had opened its 950th store in February that year and that its pharmacy network had reached 740. The company says it opened its 1,000th store, in Bassonia, Johannesburg, in November 2025. English Wikipedia, citing the group’s April 2025 figures, gives 944 Clicks stores, of which 890 were in South Africa, with the rest in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini; it also lists Clicks stores inside Netcare hospitals and Medicross clinics, which the company says followed a long-term agreement with the Netcare Group. The company also says its online shop, with click-and-collect and home delivery, and an app carrying a virtual ClubCard came later in the 2010s; English Wikipedia dates the online store to 2016.

Distribution is part of the story too. The company says its first distribution centre opened in Cape Town as it moved to central supply, and that it now delivers to stores through three distribution centres, while UPD runs separate hubs. The group is listed on the JSE under the code CLS.

For a design guide, Clicks shows how a South African chain can carry one name through decades of changing owners and formats, from a drugstore without a dispensary to a national pharmacy network. Compare Dis-Chem, the Johannesburg pharmacy chain founded ten years later, and Pick n Pay, the grocer that grew from the stores Goldin sold in 1967. For this guide we use a counter blue, a deep ink and a mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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