We turn retail businesses around. Then we run them right.
SocialBrand is the retail practice of PG van der Westhuizen. More than three decades of store operations, backed by an analytics capability most operators have never had access to.
Shrinkage held below 0.03% of turnover, down from 1.8%, over four years at a Checkers branch
Stock turn improvement, with staff turnover down 25% and turnover up 15% year on year
Deliveries picked daily at the Checkers Sixty60 dark store pilot in Cape Town
Of those orders fulfilled and delivered within the hour
The career record of founder PG van der Westhuizen, built across three decades of South African retail. Career results, stated as career results. Never invented, never borrowed.
Three legs. One practice.
Operations lead. The data work is the edge inside them, never the headline over them.
Retail Turnaround
The lead engagement. We take an underperforming store or group back to sustainable month-to-month profit. Diagnosis, recovery plan, supplier position, availability, budget discipline and hands-on execution until the trend holds.
The turnaround method → 02Operations & Training
The ongoing management service. Standards held daily, department management, merchandising and activations, workforce training and compliance. Our people execute on your floor. We do not advise from a distance.
How we run stores → 03Analytics & Intelligent Ordering
The edge. We measure the truth of your business, stock integrity, capital, demand and your community’s buying rhythm. Then we rebuild ordering on demonstrated demand and automate it.
The intelligence layer →Knowing your stores without standing in them
A store owner stands at his son’s rugby match on a Saturday morning. His phone is in his pocket. He already knows the soup got made. He knows the 2-litre Coke is out at one store, and he has arranged the fix, without a single call to plead for information.
That is operational freedom. It is not a dashboard feature. It is what happens when the numbers in your business are true, and someone has done the work to make them true.
What we are doing right now
A multi-store independent retail group engaged us to take it from losses back to sustainable profit. Inside six months the engagement went from no trusted data to a reconciled group data platform, live generated ordering on the major supply routes and a prediction engine in build.
The same discipline is in the live demo, running on generated data for a fictional store.
How a turnaround runs →Retail with no forgiveness
PG van der Westhuizen ran the Checkers Sixty60 dark store pilot in Cape Town. No walk-in customers. A full store built purely to fulfil app orders, where a customer orders against the ledger’s claim, so a phantom stock record becomes a failed order inside the hour. Measured.
His record there: the highest-turnover Sixty60 store on the continent at the time, north of 1,000 deliveries picked per day at about 98% fulfilled and delivered within the hour. The systems came with the model. The result came from three decades of floor operations and his own analytics discipline, applied hour by hour.
Named methods, published thinking
The thinking is the marketing. The mechanics are the moat. Each method carries a name, a definition and its author, so you know exactly how we think before you pay us anything.
Start with the truth about one store
The Store Health Audit is a fixed-fee diagnostic. Two to three weeks, one store, findings in rand, an action plan you own either way.