Kim Reid and the art of getting the parcel there

Kim Reid’s founding story begins with a purchase. In October 2010, he and Tiger Global Management acquired Take2, a South African online retailer. There were customers already buying things, technology already running and a business already in motion. The clean sheet beloved of startup mythology could stay in the stationery cupboard. Reid wanted something he could grow.

“I prefer taking something and growing it into something bigger,” he said in 2014. That is a useful introduction to his temperament because it comes from him, rather than from the usual flattering descriptions attached to a chief executive. He was willing to inherit a working business, including its problems, in exchange for momentum. Buying a beginning gave him somewhere to begin.

His relationship with Tiger Global dated to his years at Naspers. When he decided to do something independently, the investor approached him about a South African venture. The partnership paired someone who knew the local internet business with capital from outside it. Takealot.com formally launched in June 2011. Behind that apparently fresh arrival sat an older retailer and years of Reid’s corporate experience.

An acquisition changes the meaning of the word founder. It leaves room for the people who built what came before. Take2 had been launched in 2002 by investors including Neil Smith, Waine Smith and Jose Pereira. Reid’s achievement belongs to the next chapter: taking that existing shop and building the operation that South Africans came to know as Takealot.

“I prefer taking something and growing it into something bigger.”

Kim Reid · 2014

The accountant takes the internet route

Reid was born in Pretoria in January 1970. He studied at the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa, completed his articles at KPMG and qualified as a chartered accountant. His early working life included financial roles at the Gary Player Group and Sony Music. In 2000, he became chief financial officer at MultiChoice.

The route then turned toward the internet. He became Mweb’s CEO in July 2003, later led MIH Mobile TV Platforms and moved to MIH Internet Africa in 2008. The latter included Kalahari.com, an online retailer he would eventually face from the other side of the market. His career had put him inside finance, media, connectivity and online commerce before he bought Take2.

There is a pleasing lack of romance in that preparation. A balance sheet makes a stern companion for an ambitious idea. Every product held in a warehouse ties up money; every delivery costs money; every new customer must somehow help pay for the machinery assembled to serve them. Reid arrived with professional experience of the accounts as well as the appetite to build.

That sequence also helps explain why the venture was a continuation of his working life. He had already managed businesses through which South Africans watched, connected and shopped. Takealot brought the transaction and its physical consequences together. For a finance executive moving into retail, the screen was only the front window. Much of the work waited behind it.

The name that could be bought

Even the new name had a practical origin. Take2 ran into a trademark problem. The team considered Takeit, but the owner of Takeit.com wanted more than $100,000 for the domain. Takealot became the alternative, with both its dot-com and South African domains available. A brand that now sounds familiar began with the ordinary irritations of availability and price.

It is a useful little episode to keep beside the larger financing announcements. Business histories tend to make names look inevitable once they have been printed on enough boxes. This one involved a name the company could not keep, another it could not obtain at an acceptable price, and a third it could use. The shopping business had done some shopping of its own.

The episode makes Reid’s approach easier to picture without inventing a private scene. He had bought a going concern, and the going concern promptly needed a different sign above the door. The June 2011 launch supplied that sign. What followed would have to give the unfamiliar word meaning, one completed order at a time.

A website with a warehouse problem

The change underneath the name was substantial. Reid described the inherited business as having about 25 staff and roughly 300 to 400 square metres of warehouse space. Its model leaned toward ordering products in response to customer orders. He and Tiger wanted an online retailer that held inventory. That meant putting money into stock before the customer arrived to buy it.

This choice made physical goods central to the enterprise. Stockholding could help the company fulfil orders, but it also required space, working capital and control. The attractive little button marked “buy” came with a less attractive collection of bills. Reid’s job was to make the relationship between them work as the business grew.

Buying Mr Delivery gave Takealot greater control over the journey from distribution centre to customer. The group’s milestones record full ownership in 2014, alongside the acquisition of Superbalist and the launch of its marketplace. In the same year, Tiger invested $100 million. The operation was widening in several directions: deliveries, fashion and products supplied by outside sellers.

Those moves describe different ways of making a shop larger. A marketplace adds sellers; a fashion business adds another kind of shopping; a delivery network addresses what happens once an order leaves the shelf. The last of those is especially revealing. Reid’s online retail story repeatedly returns to the part of the experience that takes place away from the website.

Fridges, earrings and the limits of a machine

By November 2019, Reid could describe a warehouse handling products ranging from fridges to earrings. That range made complete automation difficult. Takealot’s answer was selective: automate the place where throughput was becoming a problem, rather than build an entirely automated warehouse and spend years recovering the cost.

At its Johannesburg operation, a sorting system read parcel addresses and sent packages down chutes toward the appropriate trucks. The destinations were defined, so the process lent itself to automation. A refrigerator and an earring have little in common, but their shipping labels can still tell a sorter where they need to go. A machine appreciates a well-posed question.

“If we could hire another 100 engineers tomorrow, we would,” Reid said that year. Takealot then employed more than 200 engineers developing its own code, including logistics systems. He also described branch owners running the local layer of delivery under service contracts. Software, central sorting and local operators each had a place in the arrangement.

His account offers a concrete version of the customer focus he talked about throughout his tenure. A sorting decision affects which truck receives a parcel. A branch affects its next leg. Engineering affects how those pieces communicate. The promise made at checkout passes through people and systems whose work the shopper may never see.

When the old rival became part of the shop

Kalahari gave the story a particular symmetry. Reid had once worked in the Naspers business that included it; Takealot then competed with it; in 2015, the two retailers merged. The group’s journey records that merger as a milestone. The company he had known from inside a corporate structure became part of the venture he had built outside it.

Customers did not all greet the disappearance of the Kalahari brand with pleasure. Some objected to losing a familiar South African name. Others would miss Karl Ahari, its advertising character. A merger can look wonderfully tidy in a corporate diagram and rather less tidy in the affections of the people who shop there. A favourite fictional spokesman is awkward to enter on a balance sheet.

Takealot also kept broadening the ways customers receive orders. In November 2019, Reid reported between 1.8 million and 1.9 million customers on the platform. The retailer had expanded into more than 21 departments, introduced its third-party marketplace and added pickup points. Delivery to the door was becoming one option within a larger set of arrangements.

The scale matters, but the underlying relationship remains personal. Someone has selected a product and paid for it. That person will judge the business by whether the right thing arrives as promised. Reid’s public discussions of logistics make more sense when read against that simple transaction. The systems were large because there were many individual promises to keep.

Making room for the next chief executive

In 2021, Reid began handing operational responsibility to a successor. Mamongae Mahlare took over as group CEO on 1 October, and he moved to the chair. The company framed the transition around its next phase of growth and its commitment to transformation. After a decade at the helm, his work would become more strategic and less involved in daily operations.

“The people with the best people win,” Reid said in the announcement of the transition. The line is brisk enough to survive a meeting. It also gives colleagues a place in a story that could easily be reduced to one founder and one investor. Warehouses, engineering teams, delivery operators and business leaders had all helped turn the acquired retailer into a group.

He took another operating role in August 2022, becoming CEO of Blue Lake Ventures Group, the business associated with BetKing and KingMakers. In January 2024, Takealot announced another change: Mahlare would become executive chair and Frederik Zietsman group CEO. Reid would remain a director and strategic adviser. His title changed again as the organisation’s leadership developed.

The KingMakers chapter also moved on. Ronnie Whelan became its CEO in February 2025. Reid’s founding CEO years at Takealot, his later chairmanship and his betting-industry role belong to distinct periods. Keeping them separate makes the career more interesting: it shows an executive moving between building, governing and advising, rather than remaining permanently frozen in his launch-day job.

“The people with the best people win.”

Kim Reid · 2021

The distance between a click and a doorstep

The warehouse photograph catches Reid leaning on a trolley amid racks and boxes. It is a fitting setting for his Takealot years. The internet supplies the order, but the inventory occupies real space. Somewhere between selecting a product and receiving it, commerce has to deal with shelves, addresses, vehicles and people.

His public record gives a fairly specific answer to what occupied him: buying a business with momentum, financing its expansion, holding stock, acquiring delivery capacity, recruiting technical staff and eventually arranging a handover. There are acquisitions and large investment figures in that record. There are also chutes and branch contracts. The smaller nouns help explain the larger ones.

Takealot made the distance between the screen and the doorstep part of the founder’s job. Reid spent his decade as CEO working across that distance. The next time a parcel arrives with the unremarkable air of something that was always meant to arrive, consider how much organisation sits behind the lack of drama. For an online shop, ordinary can be a demanding result.