Junette Stuart is not simply starting out in the business of fashion design. Having re-tooled and re-strategized she is starting over on the advice of her personal tutor, Anna Gburezyk, who had been assigned to mentor her throughout an intensive year-long correspondence course at the University of the West Indies’ Chairee Blair Foundation and has shifted her attention to pretty girls’ dresses.
That programme having ended in 2013, Stuart is now a certified mentor for women seeking help to devise strategies to enhance their revenue intake mostly by re-working their marketing strategies and diversifying their businesses to meet market demands.
Stuart’s particular areas of expertise are fashion and interior design – soft furnishings including curtains, slip covers and cushions.
Stabroek Business found Stuart in the Main Street Avenue on the eve of Emancipation Day surrounded by a wide range of clothing and artifacts: girls’ dresses, African caftans and dashikis, hand-painted and tie-dyed dresses with a distinctive Guyanese flavour and adult dresses in the fashionable colour block style.
This year marked her first appearance on the avenue. She was part of a lively bazaar comprising vendors offering just the kinds of costumes in which Guyanese would bedeck themselves for their treks to the National Park last Saturday. These tented entrepreneurs had all earlier shared with us their plans to move to the National Park the following day, Emancipation Day, taking their clothing with them.
Last Friday, business was as bright as the afternoon sun. Stuart had done well in the avenue but said that an earlier commitment to an EMPRETEC event would keep her away from the National Park the next day. She told Stabroek Business that this year’s 6-day Venture Out programme had reinforced the knowledge she already possessed. She believed, she said, that the bedrock of an expandable business was its network of potential and existing clientele. She had worked to develop just such a clientele over the four days spent in her tented boutique across from the Department of Culture. She had been able to expand her network of prospective suppliers and customers, exchanging contact information with over 250 persons. She had also dressed a few customers in African garb for the anniversary celebrations and outfitted one contestant in the ministry’s annual in-house fashion show. Those, in her books, were pretty pleasing accomplishments.
Good customer service, Stuart says, is not necessarily reflected in large layouts and huge returns. It starts to manifest itself when that customer returns consistently, over the long term and the supplier is able to develop expanding relationships and provide additional services.
Stuart has also participated in a number of training seminars that have helped her to navigate the ‘teething pains’ of a start-up enterprise, including how to identify required changes, how to study the habits of potential customers and how to reinvent products and services to meet market demand.
Before enrolling in the UWI Mentorship Programme in 2012 she was sewing and retailing school uniforms. Her mentor determined that this venture was barely breaking even mainly because this market was flooded (unintended pun) with school uniforms anyway. Together they worked out strategies for a line of casual and party clothes for girls aged 2 to 12 years.
Stuart learnt how to present to the market products that were both unique and practical. She learnt too that overhead production costs had to be reduced. While researching the market she discovered that far too many were made of silk, taffeta and satin, decidedly unsuitable fabric for the local climate. She learnt too that the colour scheme was one-dimensional and that designs lacked variety.
Determined to make a mark she searched for cotton-blended fabric, finding suppliers off the beaten track.
She had always been fascinated with the pursuit of creating things from fabrics – clothing and home furnishing pieces like cushions, curtains and drapes, place mats and hand towels. She has been designing and sewing her own clothing since she was a little girl. The tutelage she subsequently received taught her the intricacies of presentation and product longevity.
Each of her pieces is neatly surged and lined with a softer cotton/polyester fabric to enhance the fit and boutique-ready presentation. “Matchy-matchy is not fashionable anymore,” she says, so she has been blending and contrasting colours and fabrics.
On the dresses for 8 to 12 year olds, her signature rose is attached usually in a deeply contrasting colour. Rose is her middle name.
Stuart is very conscious of national development issues so she goes directly to local wholesale suppliers for fabrics, roses, zips, hooks-and-eyes and plain and elastic threads. Marketing is a different issue, however. It is widely acknowledged that the Guyana market is small. For survival and business growth, most manufacturers must seek markets and some raw materials abroad. Stuart has already earmarked fallback supply sources and possible markets in the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname.
She is now on a path to fulfilling some critical objectives. Her first order of business is to set up a mini-boutique at 46 Grove Public Road, close to her home. From there she plans to spread out to Georgetown and Bartica, to catch the tourist and visitor markets, she says. She also intends to secure a more permanent presence on the Main Street Avenue sometimes referred to as ‘Tourist Avenue’.
Time was when she taught Interior Design and Soft Furnishing to hundreds of young people at the Kuru Kuru College, Linden/Soesdyke Highway.
The registered (2013) Junshazyna World of Fashion is expected to be launched this October. Plans include a three-day exposition at which her colleague designers will be invited to showcase their creations. It will inculcate fashion shows, the culinary arts, music and cultural performances. Stuart hopes it will provide another avenue for networking among Guyanese designers and foreign suppliers, distributors and end users of Guyanese, afro-centric and continental clothing and accessories.
