It took guts to persevere with a formula that had never been tried in SA — selling fashionable clothing cheaply. The SA business scene has few highly successful disrupter companies — companies whose owners aren’t happy with the status quo and are convinced they can perform far better.
Discovery, Investec, Nando’s and Capitec immediately spring to mind in this context. But in retail there are precious few genuine disrupters. To be sure, Boxer is highly innovative, as are Shoprite and TFG. But I would hesitate to describe them as disrupters.
However, Mr Price is a disrupter. It started life using an old department store model (John Orr) as its base, then morphed into something called Specialty Stores and finally became Mr Price. This all occurred relatively quickly during the politically turbulent era of the 1980s and 1990s.
