Black Friday has become one of the clearest indicators of our economic pressures - and the resilience of both shoppers and the FMCG sector. What is a festive kick-off in countries like the United States has, here, become a moment of relief. A way for families to make December possible. A Day Built on Necessity, Not Indulgence While Americans use Black Friday to upgrade their festive season, South Africans use it to stabilise theirs. Black Friday is no longer about luxury bargains - it’s about...

Black Friday began as a US retail phenomenon. “Black” referred to the day retailers moved from “in the red” (losses) to “in the black” (profit) as post-Thanksgiving crowds swelled. By the late 2000s, the event had migrated online and global.   In South Africa, Black Friday gained real traction from around 2012 as e-commerce and major chains adopted the playbook. Today, Black Friday is no longer a single day - in fact, it’s a trading cycle that can run for most of November and shapes supply...

In retail, data tells you what  happened. People tell you why . If you’re betting your next quarter on dashboards alone, you’re solving yesterday’s problem with yesterday’s answers.   Here’s our position: human-to-human intelligence is the missing layer in FMCG decision-making . Not as a substitute for data, but as the interpreter that turns signals into action-fast, contextual, and commercially grounded.   The problem with “what” Artificial Intelligence and standard analytics are good at...