Clicks is South Africa’s leading specialist retailer of health, beauty and lifestyle products, servicing the middle to upper income market.
Background
To understand the rise of Clicks more clearly, lets take a closer at the man behind the brand, Jack Goldin.
By the 1960s, Jack had already built a successful career in retailing including the ownership of four small stores in Cape Town called Pick N Pay.
In 1967, Goldin sold the retail stores to Raymond Ackerman for R620 000. Raymond then went on to build the Pick N Pay chain into one of South Africa’s leading food, clothing and general merchandise retail group.
The sale of Pick N Pay enabled Goldin to pursue his own retailing dream of establishing an American-style drug store, featuring health and beauty items, over-the-counter medicines, and general merchandise, as well as a dispensing pharmacy.
In 1968, Goldin opened his first store called Clicks in Cape Town.
Goldin’s dream was thwarted due to a legislation that severely restricted the pharmacy market in the country. The legislation disallowed corporate ownership of retail dispensing pharmacies, helping to protect the independence of the country’s pharmacists.
Undeterred, Goldin continued to build the Clicks format of a drugstore – without the actual drugs – into a nationally operating chain. By 1971, he had opened its first store outside Western Cape.
By the 1979, the company went public as Clicks Stores Limited, the listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange enabled Goldin to accelerate the growth of Clicks, and by the mid 1980s, the company had topped 50 stores.
Goldin launched expansion into other retail markets. In 1984, the Clicks acquired the Diskom which operated 11 stores, specializing in providing health and beauty products to lower-middle income consumers, targeting especially the so-called ethnic markets.
Under Clicks, the Diskom chain was rebranded as Discom, then went on to expand across South Africa, and neighboring markets in Southern Africa. By the 2000s, Discom had grown to nearly 180 stores.
New Owners
Clicks underwent a series of changes of ownership in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. That whole process started when Goldin brought in Trevor Honeysett as the MD in 1987. Honeysett was to remain at the head of the company into the middle of the first decade of the 2000s.
Goldin continued as the chairman of the company following Honeysett’s arrival, and remained chairman even after he sold Clicks to the Score Food Group in 1988.
In 1991, however, he resigned from his position and emigrated to Australia. There he joined Priceline, a pharmacy chain which had been around since 1982, helping to reshape it to mirror the Clicks format.
Under Honeysett’s reign, Clicks expanded massively to more than 150 stores by the beginning of the 1990s.
Building on this position, the company began looking out for a new market at the beginning of the decade. In 1992, Clicks acquired Musica, the leading retail music store chain at the time. That purchase helped boost the company’s store numbers to 330 by 1994, and also enabled the group to post revenues of more than R1 billion for the first time ever.
Later that year, Clicks found itself under new ownership, Premier Group acquired a controlling stake in 1992, however, that relationship didn’t last long as Clicks was sold to Malbak in 1995.
Malbak, a subsidiary of South Africa’s insurance giant Sanlam, then set up a holding company for the acquisition called New Clicks Holdings Limited, which was later changed to Clicks Group Limited in 2009.
On the 25th of March 2022, Clicks opened its 800th store at Somerset Crossing in the Western Cape.
