How David Kimani Saved Naivas Supermarket From Collapsing

In the middle of 2001, David Kimani stood inside a shop on Ronald Ngala Street and listened to a till that had stayed silent through what should have been the busiest hour of the day. Word of a bounced cheque moved through Nairobi's wholesale trade, and by the time the second one came back, the suppliers who might once have given David thirty days to pay had stopped giving him anything at all.

He had closed one branch at Elburgon branch to come here, sending two years of sawmill-town profit into a single signboard in the capital. The signboard still read Naivasha Self Service Stores, a name that had carried weight on the road into Nakuru but meant nothing on Ronald Ngala Street. 

The good corners of the city had already gone to Nakumatt and Uchumi years before David arrived, and what remained for an unfamiliar name was rent set high enough to punish a shop before it sold its first kilo of sugar.

This was meant to be easier. David had spent six years inside his uncle Joram's shop in Rongai, waking before the sun to ride into Nakuru town, buying stock in cash, loading it onto a hired matatu, and pricing every item by hand once it reached the shelf. That same discipline had carried him through a two-branch expansion in Elburgon and Naivasha, where it built a turnover of Ksh 100 million by 1997, money that was now keeping the lights on at the new branch each month it failed to cover itself. 

Discipline had worked in every town with no real competitor in it. In Nairobi, against Nakumatt's loyalty cards, Uchumi's listing on the stock exchange, and his own uncle's name, Tusker Mattresses (Tuskys) now hanging over a store near the OTC terminus, discipline was not the thing the bigger chains were short of.

"I remember at some point, in less than six months, we almost gave up and went back to Naivasha," David would say of that year. 

What he had lost was an argument he had not known he was having: the belief that a smaller, hungrier shop could out-price Nakumatt and Uchumi on the one stretch of ground where they had already built every advantage worth having.

What changed his mind was a drive to Machakos where he found traders overcharging customers. No Nakumatt branch or Uchumi sign hung over its streets. Nothing wearing a name large enough to frighten a small trader had ever bothered to come this far. David understood, standing in a market he had not meant to study, that the fight draining him in Nairobi was a fight he had never needed to enter.

"People were being exploited. The prices they were paying were very high. That's when we changed our focus," he said. 

In February 2004, the family opened a store in Machakos, and the town required no persuading. Customers who had paid inflated prices for years walked in, found fixed prices and full shelves, and returned the following week with a neighbour beside them, the same word that had once carried his uncle's name through Rongai now carrying his through Machakos.

By October that year, they opened a second store in Komarock, a Nairobi estate too residential for the downtown chains to have ever bothered defending. Between 2005 and 2009, David pointed every shilling of new capital at towns that didn't bear the big names. The Mukuhas also rebranded the store from Naivasha Self Service Stores to Naivas.

When the family returned to Nairobi in 2009, it came in through Donholm and Eastgate, estate by estate, never again through the front door that Nakumatt and Uchumi had guarded so defensively in 2001. 

In the years that followed, the big sharks drowned and Naivas walked into their old branches as the most preferred tenant. 

They had found their footing, and the company never again came that close to closing its doors.

This story first appeared on episode two of Kenyan Founders, The History and Business Strategy of Naivas Supermarket.