Dick Smith: the electronics man who kept reinventing himself

Somewhere in a garage on Sydney's north shore in 1968, a 21-year-old with no capital to speak of and a car he'd just sold to fund the venture started stacking hi-fi components on shelves. That garage, on Waltham Street in Artarmon, is where the Dick Smith story actually begins, not in the shopping-centre carparks where the brand eventually multiplied into a national chain. It's worth separating the man from the business he later sold, because what happened to the retail chain after he cashed out in 1982 is a different story with a different, sadder ending. This one is about what Dick Smith actually built, and it's a more interesting tale than the logo suggests. For the basic biographical outline, Wikipedia's entry on Dick Smith is a reasonable starting point.

Smith is one of the few Australian founders who never really stopped talking to journalists, and the pattern of his career (spot a gap, build fast, sell at the right moment, do something completely unrelated) is unusual enough in the history of Australian tycoons and dynasties that it deserves its own accounting, separate from the franchise wreckage that came decades later.

The Artarmon garage and the electronics gap

Smith left school without particular distinction and drifted through a few jobs before landing on electronics retail almost by accident, tinkering with car radios and hi-fi gear at a time when component electronics in Australia were expensive, poorly distributed and sold by people who didn't much like explaining them to customers. He undercut the incumbents on price, imported gear more aggressively than the established players were willing to, and treated customers (hobbyists, tinkerers, CB radio enthusiasts) like people worth talking to rather than an inconvenience.

By the mid-1970s Dick Smith Electronics had grown from the single Artarmon store into a chain with outlets across New South Wales and then into other states, riding the same wave of consumer electronics demand that was reshaping retail everywhere from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Smith was a natural showman long before "personal brand" was a phrase anyone used, and he leaned into stunts and publicity with an instinct that, frankly, most marketing departments would kill for. He flew light aircraft, he set distance records, he turned himself into the face of the company in a way that made the brand feel like an extension of his own restlessness.

Selling Dick Smith Electronics to Woolworths

In 1982 Smith sold Dick Smith Electronics to Woolworths, the grocery group whose own beginnings are covered in our piece on Woolworths origins. It was, by most accounts, a shrewd exit. He'd built the chain to a scale where a major retailer wanted it, and he got out well before the harder structural pressures that eventually hit consumer electronics retailing in Australia. The chain continued to trade under his name for decades afterwards, changed hands again years later, and its eventual collapse as a listed company is a genuinely separate story, one about private equity, inventory rebate practices and a listing that unravelled, not something Smith had any operational hand in by that stage. The details are set out in our account of the Dick Smith Electronics collapse.

I'd argue this distinction gets lost too often in the popular memory of the brand, and it's a bit unfair to him. The man who built the business and the shareholders who ran it into the ground thirty-odd years later are not the same people, and conflating the two does a disservice to what he actually achieved.

What's more revealing, in my view, is what he did with the money and the name recognition afterwards, because most founders who cash out at that scale either retire to the boat or start a fund. Smith started three or four entirely different ventures instead, and had a crack at national politics on the side.

Australian Geographic and the magazine nobody thought would work

Australian Geographic launched in 1986, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that a glossy magazine about the Australian landscape, wildlife and exploration, priced at a premium and without a major publishing house behind it, was a curious bet. Smith funded it himself, put his own name and photograph on the masthead in the early years, and treated it as much as a vehicle for a set of enthusiasms (adventure, geography, conservation) as a commercial product. It worked, and it's still published today, well outliving plenty of ventures with far more conventional pedigrees. The magazine also became the base for the Australian Geographic Society, which funnelled grants toward scientific and adventuring expeditions, a philanthropic layer that sat comfortably alongside Smith's own appetite for long-distance flights and expeditions in small aircraft and helicopters.

It's the sort of thing that looks, on paper, like brand extension. In practice it was closer to Smith building a company around whatever he was personally obsessed with that year, and having enough commercial nous from the electronics years to make it self-sustaining. Not every founder can do that twice in one career. Not many try.

OzEmite, food brands and the fight over Australian ownership

The venture that best captures Smith's later preoccupations is Dick Smith's OzEmite and the broader stable of Dick Smith Foods products he launched from the late 1990s onward: Australian-owned, Australian-made groceries positioned explicitly against what he saw as the quiet foreign takeover of household Australian brands. This wasn't subtle marketing. Smith was genuinely irritated, by his own repeated public statements, that iconic local names had ended up in overseas hands, and he built a food business partly as commentary on that trend, donating profits to Australian causes and using the packaging itself to make the argument. The broader trend is traced in our list of iconic Australian brands now owned overseas.

OzEmite, his tilt at the Vegemite market, drew plenty of press and rather more scepticism from grocery buyers, and it never came close to displacing the incumbent on supermarket shelves. (The incumbent has its own story in our Vegemite history, and a general description on Wikipedia's Vegemite page.) He wound the food venture back over time, but as an act of activism dressed up as retail it did exactly what he wanted: it got people talking about supply chains and ownership structures in a way a press release never would have.

The adventurer's ledger: flights, expeditions and the stunts

Separating Smith's business record from his adventuring is difficult because he never really tried to keep them apart. He set aviation records in helicopters and light aircraft, backed and joined Antarctic and outback expeditions through the Australian Geographic Society, and treated risk-taking as a personal brand extension the way other executives treat golf. Some of this reads, in hindsight, as pure publicity engineering, and Smith would probably admit as much himself; he was never precious about being called a showman. But the expeditions also put real money behind genuine scientific and exploratory work that wouldn't otherwise have been funded, which is more than most self-mythologising founders can claim.

Population, immigration and the causes he picked fights over

Smith's activism didn't stop at grocery aisles. He became one of the more prominent, and more publicly combative, voices arguing for a smaller Australian population and tighter immigration settings, framing it as an environmental and sustainability issue rather than a cultural one, though the distinction was frequently lost in the response he got. He ran, briefly and not especially successfully, at national politics on related platforms, and funded advocacy campaigns on population policy well into his seventies. It's fair to say these campaigns won him about as much criticism as admiration, and they sit oddly next to the cheerful showman image built over four decades of hi-fi ads and adventure stunts. I don't think that's a contradiction so much as evidence he actually meant it, because you don't spend your own money picking that particular fight for the publicity.

What the record actually shows

Take the whole arc together and the throughline isn't retail genius, or even adventuring. It's a fairly consistent willingness to build something from scratch, get bored or get out at the right moment, and then go and annoy people about a cause he'd decided mattered. That's a rarer trait among Australia's business dynasties than the mythology suggests. Most founders who reach Smith's level of recognition either double down on the original business until it calcifies, as we've seen play out with mixed results across the country's bigger family empires, or they disappear into philanthropy that never risks their reputation. Smith kept starting new things that could plausibly have failed and occasionally did.

Whatever you make of OzEmite or the population campaigns, it's hard to argue Dick Smith didn't actually build things, three or four times over, largely with his own money and usually against the prevailing wisdom of the moment. That's a different legacy from the one the collapsed retail chain left behind, and it deserves to be read as such.

For more on the characters who've shaped Australian business, for better and occasionally for worse, the Tycoons & Dynasties hub has the wider collection, including pieces on Andrew Forrest's rewriting of the Pilbara and Nathan Tinkler's rise and fall on the back of coal, two very different studies in what happens after the first fortune is made.