Coles Brand Guidelines: A 1914 Collingwood Variety Store, Coles Myer and the 2018 Demerger

A variety store in Collingwood.

Coles began as a variety store, not a grocer. On 9 April 1914 George Coles opened the Coles Variety Store on Smith Street in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, English Wikipedia says, and the company’s own history page gives the same date and street, naming the founder as G.J. Coles. English Wikipedia adds that he had learned the trade in his father’s store at Wilmot, in Tasmania, between 1910 and 1913. The business that grew from Smith Street traded for decades as G.J. Coles & Coy, and that name still sits behind the company’s history: when Coles Myer renamed itself Coles Group Limited in November 2006 it took the stock-exchange code CGJ, a reference to that first registered name, English Wikipedia says.

The move into food came in the late 1950s. English Wikipedia lists the purchase of the John Connell Dickins grocery chain in 1958, the Beilby’s chain in South Australia in 1959 and the Matthews Thompson grocery chain in New South Wales in 1960. In 1960 Coles opened its first supermarket, in Balwyn, in Melbourne’s east; the company says the plan, under managing director Edgar Barton Coles, was a store that stocked everything on a household’s weekly list “from light bulbs to lemons.” From 1962 the supermarkets were branded Coles New World, the first opening in Frankston, Victoria, with what English Wikipedia describes as Space Age-themed imagery, and by 1973 Coles had stores in every Australian capital city.

The company says it developed the Farmland home-brand range of groceries in the 1970s, and that by the mid-1980s it had built liquor interests under the Liquorland and Vintage Cellars names, both still part of its business.

Coles Myer, then Wesfarmers.

The biggest change in ownership came in the 1980s. In August 1985 the Myer Emporium and G.J. Coles & Coy merged, and the official name Coles Myer Limited followed in January 1986, English Wikipedia says; the company’s own history dates the birth of Coles Myer to 25 July 1985. The merged group ran Myer and Grace Bros department stores, Target, Kmart in Australia and, from 1987, the Bi-Lo supermarket chain alongside Coles. English Wikipedia says the stores were rebranded Coles Supermarkets in 1991 and, from 1998, simply Coles, and that Bi-Lo stores were converted to Coles from 2007, the last in 2017.

Coles Myer sold Myer in 2006 and changed its name to Coles Group Limited that November. In July 2007 the Perth conglomerate Wesfarmers agreed to buy Coles Group, and the purchase was completed in early 2008, English Wikipedia says. Under Wesfarmers, Coles took full ownership of the Flybuys loyalty programme in February 2011 by buying National Australia Bank’s half share; Flybuys itself had been launched in 1993 with Shell and the bank, the company says.

Wesfarmers did not keep Coles for long. On 15 November 2018 more than 98.9 per cent of Wesfarmers shareholders voted at the company’s annual meeting in Perth to demerge the supermarket business, Inside Retail Australia reported that day, with Wesfarmers keeping a 15 per cent stake in Coles and half of Flybuys. Coles Group began trading on the Australian Securities Exchange on 21 November 2018 under the code COL. At listing, English Wikipedia says, the group included 806 Coles supermarkets, the Coles Express fuel and convenience sites, liquor stores trading as Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice Liquor, and financial services; Kmart, Target and Officeworks stayed with Wesfarmers. In May 2023 Coles sold its Coles Express sites to Viva Energy, English Wikipedia says.

Supermarket identity.

Supermarket chains in the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and the United States present themselves through a small set of fixed things: the name on the store sign, the colours of the fascia and the carrier bag, the layout of the shop floor and the names of their own-label ranges. These are the parts of a grocery identity that shoppers meet every week, and they are the parts this guide describes.

Names often carry a group with them. In the Philippines, SM Supermarket and SM Hypermarket put the initials of the SM Group ahead of a plain descriptive word, and the SM Bonus own label repeats the same two letters, while Savemore, a third format in the same family, has a name of its own. Elsewhere, a chain may keep a founder’s name, a place name or an English word written in a local script, and this guide gives each as the company or a dated source shows it.

Ownership takes several forms. Some chains belong to listed retail groups or family conglomerates with interests far beyond food; others are run as co-operatives owned by their store operators, or as businesses owned by their employees. Where a chain has changed hands, merged or been demerged, this guide gives the owner and the date from a dated source, and describes any deal not completed as pending.

Store formats, networks and own-label ranges are given in the companies’ own terms and with their dates, because networks change quickly and a store count is only true on the day it was published. Founders, owners and retail groups are named as corporate pages and the press record them. Colours and typefaces are treated as an unofficial interpretation unless a source documents them, and no sign, logo or package is reproduced.

A red name over the door, and a family of own labels.

Today Coles Supermarkets is run from Hawthorn East, in Melbourne, as part of Coles Group. English Wikipedia gives its 2025 network as 861 stores, made up of 830 Coles supermarkets and 31 smaller Coles Local stores, with about 115,000 staff, alongside the Coles Online shopping service. The same source lists the current own-label ranges as Coles, Coles Simply, Coles Finest, which it dates to 2006, Coles Organic and Coles Ultra; earlier labels such as Farmland, Smart Buy and “You’ll love Coles” have been retired.

Its advertising platforms have changed over time. English Wikipedia records “Good things” from March 2018 and, from October 2020, “Value the Australian Way” as the brand platform. In 2018 Coles ran Little Shop, a promotion of miniature grocery collectables, which it later brought back for a Christmas run, the same source says. Its packaging has been reworked range by range: in March 2024 B&T reported that the agency Hulsbosch had redesigned the Coles Finest packs, with a master logo made of a stamp, the Coles name and a “Finest” wordmark, and a honeycomb pattern on a black ground as the range’s distinctive asset.

Behind the shelves, the business has rebuilt its warehouses. English Wikipedia says Coles opened its first automated distribution centre built with Witron in Redbank, Queensland, in April 2023, a second at Kemps Creek, New South Wales, in August 2024, and two customer fulfilment centres using Ocado technology at Truganina, Victoria, and Wetherill Park, New South Wales, in the second half of 2024. The Coles name is not to be confused with the British microphone maker Coles Electroacoustics or the American birdseed company Cole’s, which are unrelated.

For a design guide, Coles shows how a store name can stay constant through a century of owners, from G.J. Coles & Coy to Coles Myer, Wesfarmers and a listed Coles Group. Compare Woolworths, its long-standing Australian rival, and Aldi, which also trades in Australia. For this guide we use Collingwood red, ink and paper tones with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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