By her own admission Melissa Piggott has ambitions that far exceed her first venture into business since re-migrating to Guyana seven months ago. Delightfully engaging and adept at marketing her novel enterprise in an entertainment industry that is growing much quicker than most other sectors in Guyana, she reflects that spirit of youth and enterprise which, gradually, is beginning to come through in local entrepreneurship.
BAR-10-DA is a mobile cocktail bar service, a thoughtfully creative “invention” that has about it a kind of catching on quality. Patterned after the westernized genre of up-market service associated with entertainment industry of metropolitan night life, BAR-10-DA literally brings the drinks to the party, a full bar of exotic cocktails and shooters created by Melissa herself.
BAR-10-DA’s marketing ‘pitch’ transcends the conventional rum and ruckus that characterizes much of the local entertainment scene. The service is fashioned to sit as comfortably at the local carnival as it is at a diplomatic cocktail, customizing its offerings to suit the occasion. Its appeal is located in Melissa’s practised expertise in mixing cocktails and offering them for tasting and review. It is a potentially lucrative if somewhat daring pursuit that places its faith in the ability of its offerings to satisfy even the most prejudiced palates.
Nor is it a skill that is easily acquired. That BAR-10-DA literally brings the drinks to the party is perhaps the less challenging part of the equation. Mixing and offering cocktails that meet with the approval of varied events and dispositions is the more challenging pursuit. Melissa learnt her trade as a bartender in New York during an 11-year sojourn in the United States. In the process she earned an MBA in Marketing from Pace University, securing skills which, she says, she intends to infuse into her business pursuits here.
For the time being, however, she is focused on the popularizing of BAR-10-DA. She seeks, she says, to utilize her expertise to train like-minded persons to support the enterprise. Her focus is clear. She wants to make a mark in the local entertainment sector by offering, in aesthetics, product quality and service, a cocktail bar that is second to none. High service standards aside, Melissa says that it is imperative that BAR-10-DA seeks to create fresh cocktail recipes if it is to sustain a high level of consumer interest. To accomplish this BAR-10-DA will be promoting what Melissa says are its own “signature cocktails” created exclusively out of local products. “These cocktails and shooters will also be customizable, designed to the customers’ businesses and occasions,” she says.
Bar-10-DA made its first appearance on the Guyana entertainment circuit on Mash Day, 2010. It was, Melissa says, “a pleasing start,” a debut event that afforded the service exposure to the widest possible cross-section of Guyanese. The ultimate objective she says is “to position the BAR-10-DA to become a novelty service that any major entertainment event cannot do without. We want to become a benchmark service provider in the entertainment industry.”
