Edgars is turning a page few gave it a chance to reach. Six years after the department store chain came within weeks of liquidation, its owner, Retailability, has confirmed plans to open 50 new outlets over the next two years, with the first opening this month. It marks the clearest signal yet that a brand once synonymous with financial distress now sees itself as a growth story rather than a survival case.
The shift follows a three-year overhaul that reshaped how Edgars trades rather than simply where. Since Retailability rescued the chain from business rescue in 2020, the retailer has handed back more than 100,000 square metres of retail space to landlords, cutting its footprint from roughly 465,000 square metres to 360,000 and saving over R150 million a year in rent. Retailability chief executive Norman Drieselmann has described the approach as building stores sized to match what each community can sustain, rather than assuming that scale alone drives performance. Credit sales, once central to Edgars’ business model and a major factor in its earlier collapse, now make up only about a fifth of turnover, leaving the group far less exposed to the cost of consumer debt.
READ – Pepkor Approved to Acquire Several Clothing Brands
Whether the timing suits an expansion drive is less clear cut. South Africans remain under pressure from a repo rate that the Reserve Bank lifted to seven percent in May, its first hike in three years, alongside inflation running near the top of the target band. Waldo Krugell, an economist at North-West University, has noted that improving macroeconomic conditions would support Edgars’ plans, though he has also questioned where exactly the retailer intends to compete in an already crowded clothing and beauty market.
| Metric | Position |
|---|---|
| Retail space returned since 2020 | Over 100,000m² |
| Annual rent saving | R150 million+ |
| Credit share of turnover, then vs now | Majority in 2020 vs approximately 20% now |
| Current store network | 100+ nationwide |
| Planned new stores | 50 over two years |
| Textiles, clothing and footwear retail sales growth, year to April 2026 | 2.3% |
| Overall SA retail trade sales growth, April 2026 | 1.3% |
| SARB repo rate | 7.00% |
Statistics South Africa’s most recent retail trade figures lend some support to Edgars’ timing. Sales in the textiles, clothing, footwear and leather goods category rose 2.3 percent in the three months to April compared with a year earlier, continuing a run of gains that touched nearly ten percent in January before slowing. That outpaces overall retail trade growth of 1.3 percent over the same stretch, suggesting clothing spend has held up better than the broader consumer basket even as households contend with higher borrowing costs.
The rollout extends beyond core Edgars stores. Retailability is opening Edgars Connect, its first standalone cellular outlet, this month, and expanding the Edgars Beauty chain into Paarl and Stellenbosch, adding to 18 existing beauty-only stores. Kelso, the group’s mass-middle-market womenswear brand, has just opened its fourth store, at Tygervalley, after what the company describes as an encouraging pilot phase.
READ – Sanlam set to acquire a retail distribution company
Edgars now competes against a retail sector dominated by JSE-listed rivals with far greater scale, including TFG’s Jet chain and Mr Price, both of which expanded while Edgars was shrinking. Retailability’s own history includes acquiring Legit from Edcon in 2017 and taking on more than 120 Edgars stores during the 2020 rescue, giving the group a combined base of several hundred outlets across its brands.
Drieselmann has framed the expansion as deliberate rather than opportunistic, arguing that the retailer now understands precisely which markets it can serve profitably. For a brand approaching its centenary, the coming two years will test whether operational discipline built during contraction can be sustained through growth.