PEP Brand Guidelines: The 1965 Upington Company Whose First Store Opened in De Aar

A shopkeeper in Upington needs a new company name.

PEP grew out of a shop in Upington, in the Northern Cape. The historian Anton Ehlers of Stellenbosch University, in a 2007 paper for the Business History Conference, traced how Renier van Rooyen became co-owner of a store called the Bargain Shop in the town, set up his first company, Bargain Stores (Pty) Ltd, in 1957, and then traded under the name B.G. Bazaars. Ehlers wrote that the B.G. Bazaars branches spread to towns such as De Aar and Beaufort West, selling cheap clothing to the lower end of the market, and that van Rooyen closely studied a national clothing chain, Bergers, as he built his own.

By the mid-1960s van Rooyen wanted to grow faster with outside shareholders, which meant a new company. Ehlers wrote that the Registrar of Companies refused B.G. Bazaars as a company name, because a firm in Potchefstroom had already registered a name with the same initials. Van Rooyen wanted something short that worked in both Afrikaans and English. One of the people involved in the plans brought him a list of ten possible names, among them Jet and Pep; van Rooyen chose Pep at once, Ehlers wrote, partly because he already used the word to urge his staff to put in more effort.

The paperwork followed quickly. The memorandum and articles of Pep Stores (Pty) Limited were signed in Upington on 17 August 1965, and the company was registered on 14 September 1965, according to Ehlers. Fewer investors came forward than van Rooyen had hoped, so the founding shareholders were mainly family, relatives and close friends. In August 1965 the company took a warehouse in Woodstock, Cape Town, for buying and distribution, because the port and the city’s clothing makers made it a better hub than Upington.

De Aar, a listing and a holding company.

The first PEP store was not in Upington. At the company’s first general meeting, on 14 October 1965, the directors approved premises in Cape Town, Postmasburg and Kimberley and agreed to take over the De Aar branch of B.G. Bazaars, which became the first Pep store in the country, Ehlers wrote. Growth was rapid: by 1969 Pep Stores had thirty branches, in March 1970 it decided to become a public company, and in June 1972 it listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. A company brochure of the period, cited by Ehlers, mapped 164 branches in 1971.

The 1980s brought a new owner and a new structure. By 1981 PEP had about 500 stores and ten factories, English Wikipedia says, and that year the businessman Christo Wiese bought van Rooyen’s shareholding, according to both the English and Afrikaans Wikipedia. In 1982 the listed company was renamed Pepkor, with PEP Stores becoming a subsidiary. In November 2014 Pepkor was bought by Steinhoff International. Pepkor returned to the JSE as a listed company in September 2017, and English Wikipedia says its former major shareholder Ibex Topco had sold its remaining stake by July 2025.

Today PEP is a brand of Pepkor, the Cape Town holding company whose other chains include Ackermans. Pepkor’s interim results for the six months to 31 March 2026, published on its investor site, put the PEP store base at 2,725, after 38 new stores in the period. The same report counted 483 PEP Home stores. PEP also trades in other African countries through PEP Africa, which Pepkor reports as a separate unit.

Fascias, ranges and catalogues.

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.

Homeware stores, malls, phones and parcels.

The newest PEP format is a home store. Moneyweb reported in May 2022 that Pepkor had spent about a decade developing PEP Home as a standalone format, and that by September 2021 there were 294 PEP Home stores. Ordinary PEP stores sold mainly blankets and a few basics for the home; PEP Home carried a much wider range, from décor to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom basics and linen. The paper noted that PEP had also moved into large malls such as Canal Walk in Cape Town, Rosebank Mall and Mall of Africa, far from its small-town roots, helped by a refreshed, “trendier” PEP logo. By March 2026 the PEP Home count had reached 483, and PEP Home began selling online in October 2025, Pepkor reported.

PEP stores also sell far more than clothes. Daily Maverick reported in November 2022 that most of the mobile phones Pepkor sold that year went through PEP, and Moneyweb listed a separate PEP Cell chain among the group’s formats in 2022. The Daily Maverick report also described PAXI, Pepkor’s low-cost parcel service, which uses the group’s store network and distribution to let customers send and collect parcels at its shops, and was then offered in 2,800 stores. Pepkor said PEP added schoolwear to its online shop in January 2026, and its interim report for that period listed FoneYam, a phone rental product, among PEP’s cellular offers.

Across these changes the name has stayed the one picked in Upington in 1965: three letters, short enough for a small-town fascia and easy to read in Afrikaans and English alike. English Wikipedia notes that the name is styled in capitals, as PEP, and Pepkor uses it as a prefix for related units such as PEP Home, PEP Africa and PEP Cell.

For a design guide, PEP shows how a three-letter name chosen to get past a registrar can carry a chain from one converted country store to thousands of branches, malls and parcel counters. Compare Ackermans, its sister chain inside Pepkor, and Mr Price, another South African value clothing group that grew from a single shop. For this guide we use a bargain blue, sunbeam yellow and Karoo-sand tones with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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