A legacy of exquisite weaving:
EXQUISITE WICKER is a small operation that for more than 20 years has been making wicker furniture out of its 92 Hope Road location, smack in the middle of the Liguanea commercial and residential district in Kingston.
David Myrie spent his earliest years in the business that his mother, Mary Ellen-Dempster, had taken over in 1999 from a tenant at the location who was shuttering the venture.
When Myrie, who had migrated to Miami, Florida, in the United States, at 10 years old, graduated from university in 2008 with a degree is international business and finance, his first thought was definitely not the wicker business. With his mother retiring and none of his four sisters keen on
continuing the business, Myrie, at 26, took on the challenge – tentatively at first – but has kept the venture going.
Exquisite Wicker is one of several businesses housed in a small commercial complex owned by Myrie’s parents, Dempster and
Hopeton Myrie, since the mid1980s. The location started out as the home of Auto Shack Limited in 1985, and the owners have operated various businesses, including car rental, auto repair, flooring, carpeting and rug distribution.
Now the space is rented as 14 shops, and the younger Myrie assists his father in managing the property. It is also home to an events management business operated by his sister Teri Myrie; and Bookophilia, started by another of his sisters, engineer Andrea Dempster, who has since sold out her interest to her business partner and is co-founder of Kingston Creative, the arts district and entrepreneurial hub in downtown Kingston.
For David Myrie, things have come full circle as the first two or so years of the wicker furniture business under his control were good, with buoyant sales, he recalls, then things nosedived, and have only begun to pick up again over the past three years. He has a vivid recollection of when the decline set in – just around the time of the west Kingston incursion of 2010.
“That played out badly not just for tourists, but for locals too. The place was like a ghost town and that lasted for a while. Nobody was buying furniture. I went through all my savings,” the businessman recalls.
With business having picked up, Myrie now provides employment for up to 10 contract workers – carpenters, welders, upholsterers and weavers – in the business in which he has modernised styles and jazzed up product lines to include furniture made of wicker, metal and wood, as well as decorative lighting fixtures and other home accessories.
Whereas in the past Exquisite Wicker relied on a small clientele of homemakers, it is now a supplier mainly to small hotels, villas and restaurants in a niche market mediated by interior designers, who now bring in the bulk of the business.
The business has furnished small hotel Jake’s in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, Café Blue, Couples Negril resort, The Steak House on the Verandah restaurant at Devon House in Kingston, Miss T’s Kitchen in Ocho Rios, among other clients in Jamaica.
Overseas market
In a test of the overseas market, which Myrie intends to service more fully in the future, a few years ago he received an order to furnish a sports bar and restaurant in South Beach, Miami, and says he has shipped a few pieces to a few other customers overseas.
A similar opportunity is now being discussed for furnishing another restaurant. When that time rolls around, the businessman says he would have learned some important lessons about stockpiling and shipping to serve the overseas market. “The thing with shipping furniture is, if it’s not a full container, you are wasting your time,” he points out.
Extending the business overseas was the initial plan, according to Myrie, who is also the creative force behind the furniture designs. While that has still
not panned out, he hasn’t given up hope of creating an international footprint, concentrating on the US market sometime in the future. He did most of his overseas sales in the down period, but with the local market thriving again, he has been busy trying to keep up with the demand.
“It has been challenging, but I enjoy the work,” Myrie says. Among the challenges has been finding appropriate and knowledgeable staff to keep up with demand and reliably plan for expansion.
“The staff that does the weaving were the original staff who were with my mother and the gentleman before her. That has been consistence. We have times when the workload is heavy and we do have a problem finding staff,” he said.
Other challenges include the high price and unavailability of other inputs apart from wicker, which is sourced from persons in Portland, who pick, strip and dry the plant material.
With zero presence in the traditional mass media, marketing for Exquisite Wicker is by word of mouth and through an engaging social media presence, particularly Instagram and Facebook pages managed by the entrepreneur himself.
Building a strong brand presence for his unique line of furniture is the current preoccupation, and he is in talks with furniture retailers about the right opportunities for distribution through those channels. Myrie admits that the sticking point with large retailers has been his insistence on keeping the Exquisite Wicker brand on the items.
While expansion is still in the works for some time down the line, the entrepreneur says a bank loan is not an option he is considering. “I don’t believe I will end up at the bank,” says the apparently credit-shy businessman with interest in real estate that is conservatively valued for tax purposes by Tax Administration Jamaica at $59 million, but is closer to $100 million at market rates.
There has been interest shown by various persons in buying the nearly 2,500 square metres of land for redevelopment, but Myrie says he and his parents are not selling the property. In fact, they have thoughts of future redevelopment of their own, but are in no hurry to change the current land use and business model.