Brand of the Week: Meltz
by Fred Roed on 31/03/06 at 12:44 pm
9 comments
This weekend I discovered Meltz. In the past, I used to shop for clothing almost exlusively at two places: Edgars and the Waterfront. Most of the time it would be Edgars. Any Edgars would do, since I had an account with them. And most of the time I would charge everything to my account. I ran a pretty disciplined clothing budget: the moment there was credit left on my account, I would spend it. Apparently, this was a good strategy because every 6 months or so, I would get a letter from the Edgars accounts dept. saying ‘Congratulations! Since you are such a good customer your credit has been extended to R5000!’ or ‘R7,000′ and so on. The more I shopped, the more credit I got. What a country! Every now and then I wondered why they did this, especially considering that I wasn’t very diligent with paying the monthly outstanding amounts, but mostly I just said ‘what the hey’.
Anyway, after a while, I got pretty friendly with the lady at accounts (Edwina was her name) and it dawned on me that the interest on my late account was starting to eat into my entertainment budget, which was loosely based on how much money I had in my personal account. Finally, about a year ago I finally closed the huge deficit between clothing credit (Buy now! Pay later!!) and normal rational intelligent thinking.
With a healthy dose of humility, I resigned the Edgars card to the scrapheap, and since then, I’ve been shopping a little more ‘frugally’.
And so, it is was this track record that I tentatively toed the waters of Meltz Mega Factory Store in Diep River, Cape Town. I always thought of Meltz as a bit of a nowhere sort of place, but after walking in there for the first time I was blown away by great service, great clothes (branded and non-branded) and brillliant prices. We spent an hour there and my wife and I walked away with a set of funkstyle clothes for R290 (pretty much what one shirt costs at Edgars). And for that, Meltz walks away with this week’s ‘Brand of the Week‘.
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
steve
Apr 4th, 2006
Shouldn’t edgars be the brand of the week? Afterall they were the ones making huge money out of you, from business point of you they have a much more sustainable and effective business model, even if it is harnessing the materialistic nature of human kind to make a profit?
Importing cheap chinese clothes isn’t that cool either, but the lowly South African consumer paying between 20 and 45% tax plus 14% vat and a riduculous petrol price can be excused for looking for a cheap deal.
Jon
Apr 5th, 2006
sounds like steve is in the running for brand manager.
Fred
Apr 5th, 2006
Hey – Meltz is cheap but they good. Really good. Way better than Edgars. See, I’m onto Edgars now: I reckon they are too expensive, although they got some cool stuff. I am now an official Brand Ambassador for Meltz!
Chris Rock
Jan 23rd, 2007
all i have to say is PEP is the best….. so leave edgars and Meltz go for pep
Matahari
Apr 10th, 2007
You’ll be interested to know that Edcon (the owner of Edgars) are also the majority owner of your brand of the week – Meltz!
siyabulela
Jun 6th, 2007
I am dissapointed @ the fact that the Somerset Branch does not have as much male brands as the women eg. Tommy Hilfiger,Lee Cooper denims etc. So I would appreciate it if the brands were equally distributed.
In The Know
Jun 12th, 2007
Matahari,
Sorry you’re very mistaken.
Edcon has absolutely nothing to do with Meltz at all.
I love Meltz!
Kim Lowe
Aug 7th, 2007
I agree that Edgars is way more expensive that meltz but when it comes to quality I think Edgars comes tops!
Anna Smith
Sep 19th, 2007
The SENIOR staff at Cape Gate has no people skills. Try to avoid shopping there until new managers manage that store!!!!