Fashion designer Carol Fraser has returned home from the recently concluded Guyana Trade, Tourism and Investment Expo 2014, in the United States chastened by the experience and altogether persuaded that marketing Guyana and what it has to offer to the outside world remains a work in progress.
She deflected questions as to who might be to blame for what some of the 40-odd participants said were glitches that occurred in Florida that left some of them brooding and which prompted Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) Chief Executive Officer Keith Burrowes to come to the defence of the organization whose task it was to undertake the Guyana end of the planning of the event.
Fraser made the point that opportunities like the Florida event can give rise to exalted expectations. “Where local producers believe there is an overseas market they will always look for that commercial opportunity,” she said. That, she said, might have been part of the problem with some of the participants in the Florida event. In this regard she said she believed more could have been done to make clear the distinction between what some participants appeared to expect from the event and what they eventually got from it.
“There is a difference between a trade show and a trade fair. The Florida event was a trade show so that those participants who might have anticipated a lot of vending and a lot of sales opportunities may have been disappointed. This, as far as I am aware, was never intended to be a mass market. At least that was not my expectation,” she said.
“It was an opportunity for the participants to promote their products and to create business contacts. I believe that if that understanding had been clear to all of the participants in the first place, things would have gone differently.”
Fraser said some of the participants’ decisions to travel to Florida in the first place may well have been informed by misperceptions of the nature of the event.
While stopping short of heaping the blame for such disappointment on Go-Invest, Fraser conceded that she was uncertain as to whether the participants were properly briefed on the nature of the undertaking and what they could expect of it before they left Guyana.
According to Fraser she, and, she believed, the other fashion designers, did not travel to the Florida event with the expectation of vending there, though they would not have been indifferent to sales opportunities. It was, she said, “a matter of experience.” She explained that some of the designers were part of the group that had gone to trade shows in the Caribbean and North America before and therefore knew what to expect. On the other hand, she pointed out, “it may well be that many of the creative people from the local art and craft association who were part of the event may well have had different expectations.” That, she believes, has to do with the fact that some of them would have invested “pretty significantly” in getting themselves and their products to Florida.
Still, she believes that Florida threw up some noteworthy pockets of success. “There is clearly a market for Guyanese creative work in the United States,” she said. “I believe that some of the creative people may have actually sold some of their work and I understand that all of the Amerindian craft pieces were taken by a few buyers. I believe there is a suggestion there that if we can get the marketing right what we have to offer could make an impact.”
She said the North American market could hold potential for local fashion designers too, though she pointed out that the opportunity was seasonal and that the competition “fierce.” In Florida much of her own energy was focused on creating structures through which she could expose her work to overseas buyers. That, she said, was perhaps a fundamental difference between those participants in the Florida event who sought to maximize the “sales opportunity” and those, like herself, who are still focused on building bridges to an external market.
As to how institutions like Go-Invest can contribute to maximizing market opportunities for the Guyanese creative community abroad, Carol said that as far as Florida is concerned—and not for the first time—the outcome left evidence that there is still a great deal of work to be done to create the supporting infrastructure to effectively promote Guyana and what it has to offer abroad. “We really need to create the pool of skills necessary to market the country and what it has to offer. Very often it is a demanding job that requires types of skills and sometimes those skills are absent,” she added.
As far as Florida was concerned, she pointed to what she believed might have been “breakdowns in communication” that might have led to exalted expectations. “The point is that we are dealing in a competitive environment and some of our limitations include a lack of training in how to get the best out of events like the Florida event,” she added. She urged that Guyana begin to pay “more specialized attention” to marketing itself abroad.
Fraser applauded the support extended to the visiting group in Florida by the Consulate there and by one-time Guyanese journalist Wesley Kirton. “They clearly went out of their way to offer us various forms of logistical support and our participation in the Jamaican Jerk Festival and some of the sales negotiated for some of the craft work was, I believe, down to Mr Kirton,” she said.
For Fraser, one of the high points of the Florida experience was the opportunity which it afforded a group of local creative people “to make contact with a potentially lucrative market.” It was, she said, as much a challenge as it was an opportunity.
She explained that talent and creativity are probably no longer enough to realize commercial success. She said that those gifts must now be supplemented by marketing skills and by an understanding of external markets. “In the fashion design and clothing manufacturing world, for example, we face some particular handicaps. There are no fashion design schools here. There are few garment manufacturing operations and we clearly do not have the sort of access to high quality fabric that positions our designers to become major players on the international market,” she said.
On the whole, she believes that while there is evidence of outstanding talent in the local fashion design industry, talent cannot necessarily be equated with success. “A lot of our creative people are still hoping to put the two together,” she added.
Fraser said she continues to believe that there is marketing potential in the diaspora. She said it goes beyond patronage and into the realm of people in the diaspora “appreciating home-grown talent.” Still, local creative people can take nothing for granted since what we produce will be evaluated against “what is out there on the rest of the market,” she said.
As for Florida, Fraser said it is a question of building on such achievements as the event might have realized and learning from the glitches. The challenge, she said, was to learn quickly, “so that the next time we would be better prepared.”
