The OK Zimbabwe Group celebrated the opening of its first-ever Bon Marché store outside of Harare this past weekend in Marondera.
The opening celebrations, hosted within the town located 60km outside of Harare, included supplier promotions, free toll gate passes, product sampling and several US$20 vouchers issued to lucky individuals.
The Bon Marché Marondera store becomes the 9th supermarket within the company’s flagship high-end Bon Marché brand offering and the first new store built outside of Harare’s affluent Northern suburbs.
OK Zimbabwe designed the new look store using the latest thinking in retail architecture, which emphasises natural light, sustainability and quality finishing.
Juliet Ziswa, OK Zimbabwe’s marketing director, who was the lead director in the new format store design, said:
We began with the shopper in mind and built our store around international trends that make shopping more pleasurable and enjoyable. The store, for example, has very wide aisles to accommodate family shopping missions, it optimises the use of a lot of light throughout the store, to accentuate the freshness of our fruit and vegetable range, and we have built sustainability into the design by using glass door coolers throughout the shop for better energy efficiency.
OK Zimbabwe recently acquired the franchise rights to Food Lovers Supermarkets in Zimbabwe.
The expansion of Bon Marché into non-traditional geographies signals a deliberate and clear intention by the group to diversify its income from the core middle market, cornered by its eponymous OK Stores.
More: Pindula News