What you need to know:
The supermarket chain promised a great shopping experience, but all was not well under its roof.
Behind veneer of a thriving retailer, it was a place where suppliers burnt their fingers and money stolen.
From the outside, Nakumatt looked like a thriving supermarket. Its tagline, ‘You need it, we’ve got it’, assured shoppers that they would get a variety of products in an idyllic environment, “all under one roof”.
But it was also a place where suppliers burnt their fingers, money was siphoned offshore and employees stole Sh1 million a day with reckless abandon. That was Nakumatt’s elephant in the room; and interestingly the elephant was its logo.
Supplies kept the lie going, bursting the shelves and aisles with every item a supermarket thrives on: toilet paper, electronics, water, rice, beans, pasta, bread, frozen foods – name it.
It all started in 1973. A young Atulkumar Maganlal Shah, fresh from completing his primary education, dropped out of school to work at his father’s Nakuru-based Tiku Fancy Store in what would kick-start a 47-year journey in Kenya’s retail sector.
Atul, as he was known, would never step into a classroom again, at least not as a student.
They say the apple does not fall far from the tree. Atul followed in his father’s footsteps – building a retail outlet from the ground up and watching it go bankrupt over unpaid suppliers’ debt.
Besides other management shortcomings, he had no idea that his employees had also devised a system to milk Sh1 million a day from the till.
History was repeating itself. Store’s collapse At 15 years of age, Atul had watched Tiku Fancy Store collapse after growing into a respected clothes dealer. Worse still, he watched as his father, Maganlal Shah, was declared bankrupt after failing to pay a Sh1.2 million debt.Tiku Fancy Store was exporting ready-made clothes to Uganda, but its owner made the mistake of advancing stock to customers in the hope that they would not find it difficult to pay. They didn’t pay back.Bankrupt, humbled and obviously worn out, the senior Shah went to work for his brother Hasmukh, who owned the Nakuru Mattresses shop in the Rift Valley town and was supplying mainly to boarding schools.In 1978, Atul and his brother Vimal (not related to Vimal Shah of the Bidco Africa) set up a clothes shop in Nakuru, by the name Furmatts.Furmatts started to grow as a respected […]
