Our Story
My name is Malcolm Westmore & I am the founder of Westcor.
Our story starts with me moving to South Africa and joining the department store group Greatermans (later to merge with Stuttafords) as a buying manager.
In the early 80’s I decided that I wanted to use my corporate retailing experience to “do my own thing” and so I joined one of my suppliers who had a small fashion jewellery factory, with an option to take up a % share of his business.
That partnership was very successful for us, from both a personal and a business perspective and which, when he retired from the business, led to the formation of Westcor; which has, over the years, grown into a more complete accessory solution.
A key ingredient of our success, and how we have outlived all of our competitors of that time lay in the fact that, whilst he was very technically competent (he had an Engineering degree & an MBA), I was able to bring retail thinking into what was until then, a traditional wholesale business.
It was this combination of technical and retail thinking that led to us forming our unique business model.
We reoriented the metrics of our business, away from measuring how much stuff we sold to our Clients to –
How much of our merchandise sold THROUGH our Clients’ tills, and how efficient their stockholding was.
Thus we created our business proposition of –
“Us partnering with our Retail Clients in serving THEIR Customers”, and developed what today we call our Full Service Program
Over the years we have more comprehensively formulated what we call our purpose statement as:
“To add value to our Clients’ businesses as committed partners by providing them with: relevant, profitable merchandise collections, a parallel retail planning/ replenishment capability, a shared stock risk and a unique in store merchandising service; whilst honouring and supporting our supply partners, creating a secure and successful environment for ourselves and contributing to our community.”
To execute on our partnership concept, we have built a business culture of:
A team of high values, high performance people who work as an effective retail team that is totally focused on serving our Retail Clients through constant innovation and excellent execution and who are concerned about and are contributing to our community.
We see ourselves as Retailers without Stores and our business mission is summed up as:
“Be the best supply partner to the best retailers in the country”
Malcolm Westmore