Anyone who shops at Kmart knows Anko. It’s Kmart’s ‘home’ brand which stands for A New Kind Of and odds are, you have at least one item in your home that dons the Anko label.
Anko has always been sold exclusively through Kmart in Australia and New Zealand but this won’t be the case for long. In 2024, shoppers will be able to pick up their fave Anko products at another popular location – Target!
Anko coming to Target
Kmart and Target are both owned by Wesfarmers and, while both mega stores are successful, Kmart is winning the race, especially in homewares and toys. Wesfarmers made the decision earlier this year to merge the two stores into one $10 billion mega business.
As part of this merger, some Anko products will be stocked in Target stores. These include “homewares and general merchandise”, according to Wesfarmers.
Ian Bailey, who became the managing director of Kmart Group in 2018, said the two stores will still operate as separate brands, with Kmart still being price-driven and Target mainly centred on affordable clothes and soft home furnishings.
The Anko collection should be hitting Target stores ‘early in the second half of the 2024 financial year’ -so, essentially, in a year from now.
The Rise of Anko
Before we filled our homes with Anko products, you may recall the &Co range sold through Kmart. There was Home&Co, Clothing&Co, Active&Co, Kids&Co.
In 2018, &Co became Anko. And a legend was born.
Anko is everywhere now. You can get Anko toys, Anko clothing, Anko homewares, Anko furniture. There are Anko towels, Anko bedding, Anko electronics. It will be fun to see the Anko brand in Targets as well, especially if you do love a good browse of your local Target.
Wesfarmers also owns Bunnings and Officeworks so it will be interesting to see if any Anko products eventually make the cross over to these stores in the future too.
Anko in America
Anko actually operates as an online and retail store in America, or it did, until June 2020 when the company shut its doors. Anko in the USA is actually a part of Kmart Australia and, although Anko USA closed, it did not have any impact on Kmart Australia, according to a spokesperson.
The Anko stores in America were much smaller than Kmart Australia stores but sold some similar products including homewares, games, crafts and stationary galore. They were designed to test the product waters with American buyers, especially during Covid and it would appear the stores were quite a success.
Over the past 18 months or so we have been operating a few small format stores in the US called Anko (named after our own brand label because we cannot operate as Kmart in the US),” a Kmart spokesperson said.
“Anko is in fact our own private label and sold in the US as an extension to our store network.
Our intention for Anko from the outset was to have a test and learn environment where we could develop retail innovation using new technologies and apply learnings that could be rolled out in Australia in a smaller format.”
While there is no intention to open up specific Anko stores in Australia, it would be a fun idea. And you never know, it could happen!
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