Yazeed Osman is a co-founder of USFL, a growth systems agency working with South African retailers. Image supplied
Heritage is not static. It evolves through what people choose to eat, wear, buy, gift and share — and retailers often sit at the centre of those everyday choices.
For brands, there is an important lesson: businesses can propose what a product should mean, but consumers ultimately decide whether that meaning resonates.
Few South African retailers illustrate this better than Big Blue.
Founded by James Robertson and his late business and life partner Philip Cronjé after the pair met while trading at a flea market in Centurion in 1986, the business has grown to 27 stores. It has remained difficult to categorise, combining clothing, gifting and wholesale with a distinctly South African sense of humour.
“Big Blue is more of a feeling than a shop,” Robertson says. “It's one part humour, one part memory and one part garments.”
That combination has become a commercial differentiator.
Retailing what South Africans recognise
Rather than relying only on conventional national symbols, Big Blue has often drawn on the everyday references that South Africans immediately recognise.
Robertson points to brands and products such as Oros and Mrs Ball’s chutney. Unlike more formal national icons, these references carry memories of everyday life and can create an immediate connection between product and customer.
That connection is particularly important in gifting.
A T-shirt, mug or other product only becomes meaningful when the person buying it believes the recipient will understand the reference. In that sense, consumers participate in creating the cultural value of a product.
“Sometimes something is funny inside the room and could be offensive outside it, and then we have to dial it back,” Robertson says.
The lesson for retailers is that participating in culture does not mean owning it. Brands can create the product, but customers determine whether it feels authentic enough to buy — and give.
Big Blue’s approach has traditionally been highly responsive. Robertson says the business prefers to test products rather than spend too long predicting what customers will want.
“We try something and see whether it works. If it does, we keep it, and if it doesn't, we stop,” he says.
It is a particularly relevant approach in a retail environment where consumer tastes, cultural references and trends can change quickly.
The customer is under pressure
While cultural relevance remains important, retailers also have to contend with a more immediate factor: affordability.
Robertson says Big Blue is seeing the impact of economic pressure in basket sizes, with customers buying fewer items than they previously would.
“Someone who would have bought the whole outfit, the shirt, the pants and the shoes, now buys fewer pieces,” he says.
The experience reflects a broader retail reality. Consumers can remain loyal to a brand while changing how frequently they shop, what categories they buy and how much they spend.
At the same time, the path to purchase has become less straightforward.
Big Blue has seen significant growth online, but Robertson says the website increasingly works alongside its physical stores rather than competing with them. Customers may browse online before completing a purchase in-store.
“We don't see the website as just another store, because it's also marketing for the stores,” he says.
That reflects a wider shift towards omnichannel retail, where the distinction between online and offline is increasingly irrelevant to the consumer.
Data meets retail instinct
The convergence of physical and digital retail is also giving businesses access to more customer information.
Big Blue's ecommerce operation, point-of-sale systems and loyalty programme provide data on purchasing behaviour and customer engagement. After decades of trading, Robertson says the business now has enough transaction history to identify patterns and make predictions.
But data has not replaced intuition.
“We're still adventurous,” he says, “and human judgement still plays a role.”
That balance is particularly relevant for a retailer whose proposition relies on humour, creativity and cultural understanding.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to enter the business, primarily for administrative work and brainstorming, while the creative team remains more cautious.
Technology can help retailers identify what customers bought and predict what they might purchase next. It is less capable of explaining why a particular cultural reference makes a customer laugh, feel nostalgic or decide to buy something for someone else.
Local has to make commercial sense
Big Blue’s South African identity also sits within a challenging operating environment.
The business remains committed to local designers and manufacturers, but Robertson says local production is becoming harder because of machinery constraints, pressure on cut-make-trim businesses, logistics challenges and port issues.
At the same time, international ecommerce platforms such as Temu and Shein have increased competitive pressure, while Big Blue’s wholesale operation has also faced product copying.
“Local manufacturing is getting harder,” Robertson says.
That creates an important distinction between celebrating local retail and sustaining it.
Local products and businesses do not survive simply because consumers value the idea of supporting local. They need to remain commercially competitive enough for customers to keep choosing them.
Consumers have the final say
Perhaps that is the most useful lesson from Big Blue’s four decades in business.
The company began with two people taking a commercial risk together. Today, its stores, digital operation, gifting and wholesale businesses have been shaped by thousands of individual customer decisions.
Retail provides a particularly clear window into living heritage because every purchase is a choice.
A retailer can create the product, develop the campaign, analyse customer data and use technology to predict demand. But it cannot dictate what becomes meaningful.
Consumers decide.
In a country as diverse as South Africa, the strongest cultural connections are often found not in grand symbols but in the everyday things people recognise, share and pass on.
Sometimes that is a recipe or tradition. Sometimes it is a product on a shelf.
And sometimes it is a joke on a T-shirt that only another South African would understand.
