Local headlines were abuzz with the name “Bash” in the past week. This was thanks to TFG releasing its results for the year ended March 2024. TFG’s numbers showed a decent performance in the core business, but finance costs after its recent acquisition strategy ate up all the profit growth. You wouldn’t have seen much on those points though, as the media latched on to the story about the online platform instead.
It’s hard to blame them, with Bash driving 44.4% growth in online turnover at TFG Africa. These are the sort of numbers we were used to seeing during the pandemic, not in its aftermath. The Bash story is seriously impressive and is doing wonders for resonance with digital-focused customers. Unless a clothing retailer is following a strategy that has extinction as its core aim, these customers are critically important.
The journey at Bash began in April 2021, with a digital lab within TFG its genesis. That was a time when many retailers were scrambling to sort out their digital offerings, as people were forced to stay home and use awful online shopping platforms that had been treated as afterthoughts by the vast majority of retailers.
At the time, there was much scepticism around online shopping. Many retailers weren’t convinced that the pandemic had driven a structural change in shopper behaviour. After all, most online platforms were still making substantial losses and were funded by venture capitalists. This is a different world to listed retailers, which need to show consistent profit growth.
There are lessons here to be learnt on both ends of the spectrum: venture capitalists shouldn’t ignore profitability, and established corporates shouldn’t ignore the need to innovate and absorb some short-term pain for long-term gain. Interest rates have already dished out that lesson to venture capitalists. As for corporates, well, some have realised this and others haven’t. You can usually identify both types from their share prices.
I found a case study on an international design company’s website about how the brand identity for Bash was put together. It’s a great read, showing how TFG thought of this as an integrated ecosystem from the very beginning. Instead of trying to patch up an existing way of doing things (for example, by each store banner in the TFG group having an online store), it invested properly in building out a strong platform business.
There’s one simple element of the Bash strategy that tells you most of what you need to know: the name. It’s not called “TFG Online” or “Foschini Online” or anything of the sort. Bash is a name and brand unto itself, leveraging the extensive store footprint in the broader TFG to offer a proper omnichannel experience.
Bash has mastered assortment and ease of use, along with a store footprint that makes order fulfilment much easier
This is important, as consumers are enjoying the convenience of shopping online but not necessarily the annoyance of couriers who never phone ahead, regardless of whether you ask them to. If the complex I live in is anything to go by, the car park that was full of cars during the day last year is now almost empty. People are back in the office and this makes deliveries a lot more awkward. Click-and-collect is a happy medium for many shoppers.
Product choice
In online retail, one of the key ingredients for profitability is the average cart size. The unit economics (profit per order) improve dramatically as order sizes increase. This is one of Bash’s biggest opportunities, as being a single platform for all TFG retail banners means there is a wide range of products that can be shopped in one place. Just consider for a moment how much weaker and more inefficient it would be if each of the brands had its own online store. This is the difference when online is treated as a standalone opportunity rather than an irritation.
The local retail sector has seen winners emerge in the digital fight. Shoprite has established an incredibly strong position in Checkers Sixty60 by focusing on excellence in execution, which is the main thing people want when buying on-demand groceries. At TFG, Bash has mastered assortment and ease of use, along with a store footprint that makes order fulfilment much easier. In both cases, of course, the platforms are backed up by the right product mix, without which there is little chance of success.
If the scooters on the road are anything to go by, nobody has caught up with Sixty60. I’m not sure anyone will catch up with Bash, either.
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