Myer: from a Bendigo drapery to the trouble at Bourke Street

Every November, a small crowd still gathers on Bourke Street to watch the Myer Christmas windows go up, phones out, kids on shoulders. I did the same thing last year, standing near the corner by the old City Square, and got talking to a woman who'd brought her grandkids the way her own grandmother had brought her in the 1960s. That's the peculiar power of Myer as a brand: it has been circling the drain, financially, for the best part of two decades, and yet it still owns a piece of the Australian Christmas that no discount retailer has managed to touch. The Myer history is really two stories running in parallel — a genuinely remarkable rise, and a slower, more complicated fall that's still not finished.

A Russian immigrant's drapery stall in Bendigo

The Myer story starts a long way from Melbourne's premier shopping strip. Sidney Myer, born Simcha Baevski in what is now Belarus, arrived in Australia in 1899 with, as the family lore has it, almost nothing. He worked as a hawker and a shop assistant before he and his brother Elcon took over a small drapery business in Bendigo in 1900, at the tail end of the goldfields boom. It was a modest operation, the sort of general store every regional Victorian town had a dozen of.

What set Sidney Myer apart wasn't the stock, it was the theatre of retail. He understood, decades before anyone had a word for "customer experience", that shopping could be an event. He staged elaborate window displays, ran promotions that got the whole town talking, and by 1908 had opened a store in Melbourne's Bourke Street, then very much a working retail strip rather than the flagship precinct it would become. The Bendigo store stayed in the family fold for years afterwards, but Bourke Street was where the ambition really showed itself.

Building the Bourke Street flagship

The Melbourne store grew in fits and starts, expanding into neighbouring buildings as Myer bought up the block through the 1910s and 1920s. By the time Sidney Myer died in 1934, the Bourke Street store was already a Melbourne institution, and the business he'd built kept expanding under family and then professional management, eventually running stores across most Australian states.

The store's Christmas windows became an annual ritual from the 1950s onward, mechanised displays with a storyline that changed every year, something between a shopfront and a piece of civic infrastructure. Families would catch a train into the city specifically to see them; for a lot of Victorians of a certain generation, "going in to see the Myer windows" is as much a childhood memory as anything from school. It's one of the few pieces of pure brand equity Myer has never really squandered, even through the worst of its retail troubles — I'd argue the windows have outlasted the sensible commercial reasons to keep funding them, and good on whoever in the marketing department still fights that budget fight every year.

The company built or acquired department stores under other names too — Sidney Myer's stake and later corporate moves rolled up regional chains — and Myer became, alongside David Jones, one of the twin pillars of Australian department store retail for most of the twentieth century.

The Coles Myer marriage

The defining corporate event in Myer's modern history is its 1985 merger with Coles, forming Coles Myer Ltd, at the time reportedly the largest listed company in Australia. The logic was straightforward: Coles brought supermarket scale and discount retail muscle, Myer brought department store prestige and a national footprint. For readers who want the other half of that story, our history of Coles, from a Collingwood variety store to supermarket giant covers how G.J. Coles built the business Myer eventually joined forces with.

The Coles Myer era ran for roughly two decades and, in truth, was messier than the tidy corporate logic suggested. Myer's department stores sat inside a conglomerate whose real growth engine was the supermarket and discount divisions. Department stores are a genuinely difficult retail format — high fixed costs, huge floor space, exposure to every swing in discretionary spending — and inside a diversified group they arguably got less strategic attention than they needed. Coles Myer eventually demerged its department store arm; Myer was sold to a private equity consortium in 2006 and then floated back onto the ASX in 2009, a listing that, by most retail commentary at the time and since, priced the business more optimistically than its subsequent share performance justified.

What actually happened to department stores

It's tempting to make Myer's post-float struggles a story about one company's missteps, and there's some of that in the mix. But the harder truth is structural. Department stores everywhere, not just in Australia, have been squeezed from multiple directions at once: specialty retailers picked off individual categories (electronics, cosmetics, homewares) with sharper focus and better pricing; online retail did the same thing at a different speed; and the shopping centre model that department stores anchored for half a century started rewarding smaller, higher-turnover tenants over the vast, labour-intensive floors a Myer store needs.

The ABS retail trade figures over the past decade show department store spending broadly flat to declining in real terms while total retail turnover has grown, which tells you the format has been losing share even in a growing market. Myer's own annual reports through the 2010s charted a fairly relentless cycle of store closures, cost-cutting programmes and management changes, several chief executives cycling through with broadly similar strategies rebadged under new names. None of it reversed the trend line in any durable way.

Solomon Lew's Premier Investments built a significant shareholding in Myer during this period and became the company's most vocal, and at times most publicly hostile, major shareholder, repeatedly criticising the board's strategy and pushing for changes. That tension between Myer's board and its largest outside shareholder became almost a subplot of its own through the 2010s, playing out at annual general meetings that were, by most reporting, unusually willing to air Myer's internal contradictions.

The brand that's bigger than the balance sheet

Here's the thing that makes Myer an interesting case study rather than a straightforward retail obituary: the brand has retained a level of goodwill that its trading performance hasn't earned. People still default to "Myer" as shorthand for department store shopping the way some Australians still say "Speedo" for any pair of racing togs, regardless of the label. Our piece on Speedo's history as the Sydney swimwear brand that clothed the world's fastest swimmers covers a similar phenomenon, a brand name doing work well beyond its market share.

Myer merged with rival department store David Jones's owner in 2024, when South African retail group Woolworths Holdings sold its David Jones business into the Myer corporate structure, effectively bringing Australia's two historic department store names under one roof for the first time. Whether that consolidation solves the underlying structural problem, or simply delays the reckoning by combining two shrinking footprints into one, is genuinely an open question, and I don't think anyone in Melbourne retail circles would claim certainty either way.

Why the windows still matter

I reckon the Christmas windows survive precisely because they cost relatively little against the scale of Myer's other problems, and because killing them would be a genuine act of self-harm to whatever brand equity remains. Bourke Street itself has changed enormously around the store — the trams, the mall configuration, the neighbouring retail mix have all shifted since Sidney Myer first bought into the block — but the windows persist as a fixed point.

Whether Myer as a trading entity looks anything like its current form in another decade is a fair question. Department stores as a format haven't been rescued anywhere in the world by nostalgia alone, and Myer's underlying retail economics remain tough by any measure the analysts publish. But the brand Sidney Myer built out of a Bendigo drapery stall has proven remarkably durable as an idea, even when the business under it has wobbled. That gap between brand and balance sheet is, in the end, the whole story.

For more brand histories in this vein, the Iconic Brand Histories hub has the rest of the series, including the Coles side of this particular Australian retail saga.