About

Retailing Africa is a prestigious business-to-business news site focusing on the retailing and consumer goods industry in South Africa and in Africa.

Retailing Africa is unique:
  • Content is journalism and research driven, providing strongly independent, exclusive news, opinion and analysis on one of the fastest growing and rapid developing, sophisticated sectors on the African continent.
  • We focus on retailers, brands and consumer trends across the African continent – the only global publication to do so – including the rise of ecommerce, mcommerce, a rising middle class, an infrastructure boom to aid logistics, rapid adoption of technology, and much more.
  • There has never been a better time to focus on Africa’s retail sector with a journalism-driven retail-focused new media brand – with the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) promising to be a gamechanger on the African continent over the coming new decade, bringing down trade barriers and creating the biggest trading block in the world.
  • Seven of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. Retailing Africa intends to tell the story of the burgeoning retail sector in South Africa and Africa, highlighting innovation on the continent and the growing ecommerce eco-system to the rest of the world.
About the Editor:

Founder & Publishing Editor: Louise Burgers (previously Marsland) has over 25 years’ experience in business-to-business and consumer publishing, as an editor, publisher and content strategist, working for South Africa’s leading print and digital B2B brands at the most influential media companies on the continent.

Louise launched Primedia Publishing’s first FMCG print magazine, the award-winning Progressive Retailing, in 1995, including brand extensions for the township market. She took over as Editor of South Africa’s oldest and most-awarded marketing publication, Marketing Mix in 1999; leaving to launch South Africa’s first digital FMCG portal, Fastmoving.co.za and electronic newsletter, FMCG Files, in 2001.

Joining Bizcommunity.com in 2004 as its first Editor, Louise was instrumental in building the well-known media brand into one of South Africa’s top B2B digital business news brands, specialising in consumer trends and insight, creating and launching the BizTrends brand as an eBook and taking it into print too.

She was headhunted to relaunch AdVantage magazine, the premier advertising print publication at the time, for Media24 in 2008, as Editor-in-Chief. While at AdVantage, Louise won PICA Trade & Industry Journalist of the year, 2010. The last few years have been spent working exclusively on Africa content and content strategy for African media, brands and NGOs. She was profiled in Top Women in Business & Government in 2005; has contributed to several books and served on various industry boards, such as the Advertising Benevolent Fund (ABF) and Magazine Publishers’ Association of South Africa (MPASA).

Louise has a Master’s of Commerce degree (MCom): Strategy and Organisational Dynamics (2006-2009), from the University of KwaZulu Natal (formerly University of Natal) Leadership Centre, in conjunction with the Copenhagen School of Business, Denmark, and the Open University in the United Kingdom.

In 2022, Louise was appointed as a Lecturer at the Red & Yellow Creative School of Business part-time Advanced Diploma in Advertising and Marketing Communications (ADMAC). She also began consulting to the global Chief Marketing Officer Council Executive Team in 2023 as Editorial Director. The CMO Council is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, and has a membership base of 16,000 senior marketers from every region in the world.

Our Manifesto:

Trust and independence are most important in building credibility in journalism and countering spin, propaganda and fake news. An independent media with strong ethics and values is the cornerstone of democracy; and building and maintaining respect for the media; and a free and fair, independent media, is something we at Retailing Africa have worked towards our whole media careers, writing for all media types in South Africa, Africa and internationally.

This is our promise:

  • We prize journalism excellence, defined as “original, quality journalism”, and will seek it out in every story.
  • If it is newsworthy, exclusive and contributes to knowledge and IP in our industry, we will cover it, without fear or favour.
  • In order to build ethical sustainable media, we need advertising sponsors. However, our sponsors’ news does not receive preferential treatment in any way on the news platform.
  • We will attempt to provide everyone with a reasonable right of reply.
  • We will be transparent in our dealings with all, be it advertisers, contributors or readers.
  • If we make a mistake, we will acknowledge it and correct it.
  • We will not engage in spin, pettifogging or malicious reporting.
  • The time-honoured principles of journalism that we were trained in and that are adopted by journalism networks around the world, are what we endorse: accuracy, independence, impartiality, humanity and transparency.
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All images are supplied by brands or sourced direct from stock photo libraries: Pixabay.com; Unsplash.com; Pexels.com.