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Herald Correspondent
The OK Zimbabwe Group celebrated the opening of its first ever premium Marché store offering outside of Harare over this weekend in Marondera.
The opening celebrations, hosted within the town, included supplier promotions, free toll gate passes, product sampling and several US$20 vouchers issued to lucky individuals over festivities that lasted three days.
The Bon Marché Marondera store, becomes the 9th supermarket within the company’s flagship high end Bon Marché brand offering, and the first new store build outside of Harare’s affluent Northern suburbs that have been the brand’s traditional stronghold. Following an earlier unsuccessful attempt opening a new Bon Marché store in Parklands, Bulawayo, years earlier, the Marondera store is an ambitious bet by the retailer. OK Zimbabwe designed the new look store using the latest thinking in retail architecture, which emphasises natural light, sustainability and quality finishing.
“We began with the shopper in mind, and built our store around international trends that making shopping more pleasurable and enjoyable. The store for example has very wide aisles to accommodate family shopping missions, it optimises the use of a lot of light throughout the store, to accentuate the freshness of our fruit and vegetable range, and we have built sustainability into the design through using glass door coolers throughout the shop for better energy efficiency,” said Ms Juliet Ziswa, OK Zimbabwe’s marketing director, who was the lead director in the new format store design.
As competition within the formal retail environment heats up, fired by shrinking disposable incomes, concentrated in a few individuals, the resilient top end shopper market has become a highly contested space.
Following OK Zimbabwe’s acquisition of the franchise rights to Food Lovers Supermarkets in Zimbabwe, the expansion of Bon Marché into non-traditional geographies, signals a deliberate and clear intention by the group to diversify its income from the core middle market, cornered by its eponymous OK Stores.
Marondera, 60km outside of Harare, hosts a vibrant farming community, and is an enclave to some of the country’s most prestigious schools. The opening of a flagship iconic store in this location is a big bet for OK Zimbabwe, wich has spared no expense in ensuring the store is among the best stocked, and most modern within the group’s entire 72 outlet portfolio across income segments.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter