In 2009, Naivas repainted every signboard it owned. Purple, the color it had carried since its days as Naivasha Self Service Stores, came down. Orange and green went up in its place, and beneath the new colors the company hung four words: Saves you money.

It was a confident thing to promise. A supermarket carries thousands of items on its shelves, and no retailer alive prices every single one of them lower than every rival, every day of the year. The claim, taken literally, was impossible to keep.

But Naivas had never intended to keep it literally. Not the whole store at least. Just thirty or forty products, the ones a Kenyan household already carries prices for in its head without needing a receipt to check: sugar, flour, cooking oil, tea, rice, tissue. The items a mother checks before she checks anything else, because running out of them is the kind of small disaster that ruins a week. On those products, and only those, Naivas watched what Carrefour and Quickmart charged in the cities, and made certain its own price sat just beneath it.

Here is what happens next, and it happens almost every time. A customer picks up a two-kilogram bag of sugar, glances at the price out of habit, and finds it a few shillings cheaper than what she paid somewhere else. She does not go on to compare the cooking fat. She does not check the soap, or the biscuits stacked two aisles over. She has already decided. The whole store, in her mind, has just become the cheap one, and she will carry that decision past every shelf she walks by for the rest of the visit, unexamined and unchallenged.

Naivas had a second weapon waiting behind the first, and it had been loaded since the early 2000s, years before the orange paint ever went up. Walk down any aisle today and you will find Naivas's own label sitting beside the famous brands: its own sugar, its own rice, its own tea, priced two to three percent below the names everyone already trusts.

It looks, at first glance, like the company giving something away. It is the opposite.

A branded bag of sugar carries, folded invisibly into its price, every shilling its manufacturer spent convincing you to buy it in the first place: the radio jingles, the billboard, the salesman who negotiated for that shelf space. Naivas's own sugar carries none of that weight. It costs less to put on the shelf, which means Naivas can charge the customer less and still keep more of every shilling that crosses the till. The cheaper price and the fatter margin arrive in the very same bag.

Out in the smaller towns, there is no Carrefour to measure against, only the local duka. Naivas does not need thirty products there. It needs only to undercut that single shop by a small percent, and it has already won the customer. 

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