Hollard Brand Guidelines: The Purple-Toned Private Insurer of Villa Arcadia, Founded 1980

A family business that became a private insurance group.

Hollard is a Johannesburg insurance group that dates its foundation to 1980. Its company overview gives that year as the date Hollard was established and describes the group as made up of The Hollard Insurance Company and Hollard Life Assurance Company, offering short-term insurance, life cover and investment products to individual, commercial and corporate clients. Willie Lategan, the group chief executive, repeated the date in August 2024, telling Bizcommunity that “since its foundation in 1980” Hollard had pursued “a better way to do insurance.”

The roots go back further. Business Day reported in December 2022 that the business began as an insurance brokerage started in the late 1950s by Robert Enthoven, a Dutch-born broker, and that it “eventually evolved into Hollard.” The same report described the Enthoven family as having interests in Hollard alongside the Spier wine farm near Stellenbosch and the Nando’s restaurant chain. Business Day called Hollard South Africa’s largest privately owned insurer, and the company uses a similar line about itself: its website calls Hollard “South Africa’s largest privately owned insurance group.”

A foreign partner arrived in 2018. Moneyweb reported on 7 September 2018 that the Japanese insurance group Tokio Marine had agreed to acquire a 22.5% stake in the Hollard Insurance Group, a deal covering both the South African business and the international arm. In 2024 Lategan spoke of “global backing from Tokio Marine,” and the company’s About page now refers to “the global backing of Tokio Marine.” The page describes Hollard as a pan-African insurer “born in the 80s” whose stated purpose is to enable more people to build a better future.

Purple, art and Villa Arcadia.

Hollard’s headquarters is Villa Arcadia, a hilltop house in Johannesburg that the company also calls its Arcadia Campus. Hollard describes it as “a building rich in history,” with indigenous gardens, a wellness centre and meeting rooms hung with contemporary African art; the title of its own page about the building adds peacocks to the list. The company says art is “fuel for our soul” and that its spaces are designed to connect people and start conversations.

That interest in art has its own programme. Hollard says its Creative Blocks scheme has run since 2004. Emerging South African artists paint on a wooden block 15 centimetres square, meet the curator once a month for critique, and the finished blocks are sold at one standard price so that first-time buyers can own an original work; owners can later exchange a block for a new one. The company says more than 150 artists have taken part and that about 2,000 blocks are made and sold each year, through outlets that include the Spier wine estate, the Association for Visual Arts gallery in Cape Town and a Hollard Purple Shop in Parktown.

Purple runs through the brand’s own vocabulary. Besides the Purple Shop, the company’s content platform, Hollard Engage, hosts expert conversations on what it calls the Purple Couch, and staff are known as “Hollardites,” a word the company calls “a badge of pride.” Hollard says it has more than 3,500 of them across ten countries and that it serves nearly 4 million policyholders; both are company figures.

The group’s cross-border arm is Hollard International, known as HINT. Its About page lists operations in Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Zambia, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and another passage on the same site says Kenya is reached through a partnership with APA. Hollard frames this as a philosophy it calls “Afro-Globalisation.”

How African insurers present themselves.

Africa’s insurers often carry their history in their names. Some of the oldest were founded in Afrikaans or English and still trade under those words or their acronyms: Sanlam’s name is built from the Afrikaans title it was registered under in 1918, and Old Mutual’s comes from a nickname for a Cape Town society of 1845. Others work in Swahili- and French-speaking markets, and pan-African groups such as SanlamAllianz present their pages in both English and French.

The visual language is usually simple: a wordmark or a monogram, a shield or an emblem, and a small set of corporate colours, with greens, blues, reds and golds common across the sector. Few of these companies publish their colour codes or typefaces, so the palettes in these guides are our own interpretations rather than official values. Brand pages tend to lean on photography of families, workplaces and communities rather than on product images, because the products themselves are policies.

Those policies are organised in familiar ranges: life cover, health cover, motor and property cover, family cover, savings, retirement and investments, alongside business and corporate lines. Many groups sell through branches, tied agents and brokers as well as online, and several have moved into banking or mobile services; Old Mutual, for example, launched the digital-only OM Bank in 2025, and Sanlam announced a banking partnership in 2026. Mobile money and USSD menus are part of how some insurers reach customers who do not use apps.

Listed groups also speak through their reports. Integrated reports, results presentations and sustainability reports set out structure, ownership and strategy, and stock exchange listings in Johannesburg, Windhoek, Nairobi, Lagos and elsewhere keep a record of mergers and joint ventures. This guide sets out what those sources show for each company, and marks what rests only on a company’s own word.

A 2024 repositioning built on levity.

Hollard’s most recent brand work was announced on 30 August 2024. Bizcommunity reported that the group was repositioning its brand to strengthen its work with intermediaries, retailers and strategic partners, under the campaign payoff line “Insure your unsure.” Hazel Chimhandamba, the group chief marketing officer, told the publication that insurance “is generally catastrophised” and that the campaign set out to take “the doom and gloom out of insurance” and bring in “some levity,” adding that the company takes its work seriously “without taking ourselves too seriously.” She also stressed human-to-human engagement through brokers and partners as the way to widen the use of insurance.

The idea carries into the current website. Its About page frames the brand platform as a question, “Searching for certainty?”, and answers it with the promise “Be More Sure,” backed by a brand video of the same name. The copy treats uncertainty as a normal part of life and business rather than something to fear, and it returns again and again to the purpose phrase “better futures,” which Hollard also uses as the name of its community programmes. The tone of voice is informal and local: the site greets readers with “Hola Hollard,” calls South Africa “Mzansi” and says its leaders bring “big gees,” or spirit, to their teams.

For a design guide, Hollard shows how a privately owned insurer can carry one colour word, a house art programme and a deliberately light tone across its names, from the Purple Couch to Creative Blocks. Compare it with Santam, its general-insurance peer, and with Old Mutual. For this guide we use a deep purple, a soft lilac and a warm gold with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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