Naivas defies norm, names boss with no blood or marriage ties with founder

Retail in Kenya is littered with cautionary tales—empires fractured by inheritance disputes, siblings turning courtrooms into battlegrounds and promising chains collapsing under the weight of unresolved grievances. Mr Kimani watched it happen to others and decided his company would take a different path.

In an interview earlier in this paper, Mr Kimani had mentioned plans of change in leadership.

"That's already done," he had said, reflecting on the careful thought behind the transition. "After seeing what happened to other players in the market, and with good advice, I decided to bring in partners with experience. Today, even if I leave, the business will continue without politics or problems. With the structures we've built, this company can stand for the next 100 years."

For Mr Kimani, handing over the reins wasn't about stepping back reluctantly; it was about ensuring that the enterprise he had nurtured for decades would endure: "I wanted someone who understands the business and has the experience to grow it further," he said.

Read: Naivas appoints first non-family CEO in 35 years

The choice of Andreas signals a shift: Naivas is no longer a family-only venture.

It's a professionalised organisation, with structures that can outlast personal ambition and family disputes. The transition is part of a longer arc. He built Naivas from a single shop in Rongai, navigating family wrangles, economic shocks and personal sacrifices. Those early years demanded everything.

"Neighbours even asked my wife if she had a husband because I left before dawn and returned late at night," he said. It's the kind of sacrifice that builds empires but strains families, the kind of obsession that creates wealth but costs presence.

Yet when Mr Kimani speaks of those years, it's with a quiet satisfaction in having endured, in having transformed those brutal hours into something tangible. The single shop became two, then five, then 20. Each expansion was a calculated risk, each new location- a bet on his ability to replicate what worked in Rongai across different markets, different demographics.

The succession plan is simply the next chapter—a practical, deliberate step to secure the legacy he has fought so hard to create. "I built something," he said. "But this business is bigger than any one person now."

Naivas recently hit its 110th store with the opening of a new branch in Nairobi's Westbay Mall in Gachie. That number represents thousands of jobs, supply chains that feed hundreds of Kenyan farmers and manufacturers, and a network of opportunity that extends far beyond the Kimani name.

Mr Kimani is proud of the families his business has helped—employees who have built homes, educated siblings, and started their own enterprises: "Some who retired now have children working with us. That's why Naivas feels like family, built by families."

And it is precisely that ethos—the care for people, the rigor of discipline, the appetite for success—that underpins the confidence with which he steps aside.

There's something almost counter-cultural about what Mr Kimani has done. In a society where patriarchs cling to control well into their twilight years, where founders confuse their identity with their company's destiny, he has chosen differently. He has chosen systems over surnames.

The transition to Andreas is, in Kimani's words, deliberate and protective: a safeguard against the turbulence of family disputes and the unpredictability of the market. It is also, perhaps, a personal acknowledgment that ambition alone is not enough; a business can only endure if it is stewarded by systems and people equipped to sustain it.

Perhaps at the time of reading this, Mr Kimani, who had expressed the need to take off and do some travelling, might be on a yacht off an archipelago. Or maybe he will just be on his balcony, staring at trees.

Either way, he can do so knowing that the business that consumed his dawns and dusks for three and a half decades will outlive him—not because he refused to let go, but because he knew exactly when to.