Edgars Harare

Edgars was founded on 6 September 1929 by brothers Morris and Eli Ross, who opened the first store on Joubert Street in Johannesburg. The name was borrowed from Swan & Edgar, the London department store the brothers used as a model. Sydney Press joined the company in Cape Town in the mid-1930s as a temporary employee and eventually took ownership, driving an expansion that added a second Johannesburg store on Eloff Street in 1937 and branches across South Africa. The chain crossed into what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the late 1940s, with sources placing the first store there between 1946 and 1949 under Press's ownership; it was formally registered as a company in 1948. By 1960 the group operated close to 140 stores regionwide, a figure that more than doubled within five years, and it later absorbed other Southern African retail chains including Sales House and Jet Stores. This Harare branch, in the Eastgate shopping centre, continues the mid-market department-store format the Ross brothers established in Johannesburg nearly a century earlier.