SM shares Tatang’s vision in Super Month campaign

MANILA, Philippines —  The SM Group holds the biggest celebration across its well-loved retail brands – SM Supermalls, SM Store and SM Markets – for the whole month of October to honor the legacy of its visionary founder, Henry Sy Sr. or Tatang to those who knew and loved him.

Tatang’s original vision, itself inspired by the needs of his fellow Filipinos, lives on in everything SM creates and nourishes. On this Super Month of October, Tatang’s birth month, it is one of the things celebrated at SM: the value of nurturing a vision.

Not everyone knows it, but Tatang was not an instant success early on in his life when he was just starting a business.

After the Second World War destroyed and burned down his father’s sari-sari stores, Tatang found himself without a business, and without a clue about how to start again.

Amid the ravaged surroundings, Tatang observed how the hardships of the previous years had taken their toll on Filipinos, as many of them had resorted to walking around barefoot.

Tatang recognized that shoes were an important symbol of a person’s dignity – the dignity millions had lost during the war. Amid this loss, and in the wake of his own personal setbacks, Tatang found for himself a new dream: shoes for every Filipino.

He put up a small store called Plaza Shoe Store in 1948 and later Park Avenue in the 1950s that began selling shoes at affordable prices to Filipinos who, like him, were eager to start their lives again.

Soon enough, his store achieved modest success. He decided to go to the US and Europe, not just to look for suppliers, but also to closely study and understand the world of retail and marketing. This was also because he harbored a larger vision of establishing not just one store, but a whole chain of them.

In 1958, on Avenida Rizal, he opened a new shoe store under a new name: Shoemart. In the late 70s, as his stores grew in size and scale, his shoe store would become a department store, just like those he had seen in America. Tatang renamed his stores from Shoemart to SM. SM’s wide and varied offerings were famously captured in the tagline “We’ve Got it All!” It is a line that survives to this day.