financial journalist Niel Joubert was given access to the Bassons’ archives and interviews with Whitey and his inner circle; here, he “recreates Whitey’s story in rich detail: from his childhood on a Porterville farm to his mentorship at Pep Stores , achieving his lifelong target of eclipsing Pick n Pay, and conquering Africa.” Read the excerpt.A smallish clothing boutique chain called Papillon was the first struggling business Whitey had to turn around.
The plan for Papillon was that it would continue trading as an independent group. The Pep team were optimistic about Papillon’s prospects – they anticipated that the group ‘would still expand enormously in future . . . and that they could make as big a breakthrough in the clothing market for the higher-income group as Pep Stores had made earlier in the lower-income group’.
‘Also, we only sold certain sizes. At Pep we had more sizes because Renier always said people complain if they can’t find their sizes. And then I said one day with my big mouth, if we’re going to stock those sizes at Papillon, we’ll be bankrupt within a year because those people aren’t my customers.’ This did not go down well, and Whitey and Renier started bumping heads about other aspects of Papillon too.
Whitey confirms this: ‘Renier wasn’t always very good with guys with degrees, and they tended not to last long.’ And Jimmy was on the same trajectory. ‘Then I said, I’ll take Jimmy and he will make it.’ So he took Jimmy under his wing. ‘He sat close to me – I had a door sawn open between my office and his, so we knew what was happening in each other’s offices.’ Fouché would eventually become Pep’s company secretary and a director of Shoprite.
According to Ashby, merging with Pep was ‘inconceivable’ to many of his employees. And Whitey describes Sam Stupple, the founder of Half Price Stores, as a nuisance. ‘I realised he had got hold of Pep’s information somewhere. He would phone me out of the blue on a Monday or a Tuesday, and then he would say he saw that this product had done well, or that one had done badly, but he wasn’t mentioning products in alphabetical order, he was talking exactly according to the computer numbers.
Some of the largest creditors were Philip Frame’s Consolidated Textile Mills and Anglo African Shipping. Whitey then drew a line in the sand: ‘I went to see them and said, don’t waste everyone’s time. Tell me now whether you will support me or Scotts, but I’m not going to plod on like this.’ A report in thereferred to a ‘secret deal’ with the liquidators, but Whitey denied this.
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