Creating a good product is one challenge. Finding the right market for it is another.
At the Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC), supporting Jamaica’s fashion and creative industries does not always mean teaching an entrepreneur how to make or improve a product. Creatives arrive at different stages. Some need technical support. Some need help refining an idea. Others already have a strong product and need greater visibility, buyer connections and opportunities to sell.
Merline Williams of Statement Dezines belonged to the latter group.
When JBDC Marketing Officer, Helen Watt first encountered Williams and her work over a decade ago, there was no question about whether she could create.
“She had a large collection and it was cohesive, and she had a wide range,” Watt recalled. “She was able to articulate the usage of each and of the various sizes. She could actually tell you the target market that each product was going to.”
The craftsmanship also stood out.
“From the beginning, from inception, she had impeccable quality,” Watt said. “She has not wavered.”
Williams had spent years developing that skill. Her relationship with crochet started at about ten years old while she was living with her grandmother and attending Cambridge Primary School. On Fridays, she would watch older girls working during 4-H Club sessions, even though she was not a member herself.
When a crochet piece went wrong and was thrown away, Williams would pick it up and study it. She turned the discarded work over in her hands, examining the loops and trying to understand how they connected.
There was just one problem: she did not have a crochet needle.
“I taught myself to make the chains with my bare fingers,” she recalled.
Her mother later bought her a crochet needle and a spool of thread, opening the door for Williams to work from patterns before eventually developing designs of her own. She experimented with clothing and, later in life, crocheted a sweater for her first granddaughter, one of the pieces that deepened her connection to the craft.
Williams would eventually formalise some of that knowledge at GARMEX HEART Academy, completing Level Two in Fashion Designing and graduating in 2016 with the Spirit of HEART Award.
Her connection with JBDC had started five years earlier.
In 2011, a friend encouraged Williams to take her designs to the Corporation. She was injured at the time and remembers limping onto the compound with her pieces and meeting Watt.
Watt saw was an entrepreneur who understood her products and customers. What Williams did not have was sufficient access to them.
She operated a store at the Harbour Street Craft Market in Montego Bay and also had products at home. Access to potential customers through hotels was limited to the days suppliers were allowed onto the properties.
“For her, she needed more market exposure,” Watt said. “She needed to get the products to have more market exposure and to be able to connect with buyers.”
JBDC’s intervention therefore centred on opening more doors.
Williams and her products were exposed through shows, expos, conferences and other market-facing opportunities. Through JBDC’s Things Jamaican stores, Statement Dezines also gained another route to consumers, putting the products before government ministries, corporate Jamaica and everyday shoppers. Her pieces have also been available through Things Jamaican at Devon House.
That wider reach matters to Williams.
“Things Jamaican has done more for Statement Dezines than I think they even realise,” she said. “Just by having my pieces in their stores, they’ve taken my brand global.”
The products themselves make Williams difficult to place neatly into one category.
Crochet remains central to her work, but Statement Dezines stretches across fashion, accessories and functional pieces. She works with denim and raffia, transforms old jeans with crochet details and creates everything from statement pieces to coasters. Red, gold and green and black, gold and green also feature in her designs, drawing on Jamaican and Rastafarian culture and connecting particularly with members of the Diaspora.
For Williams, almost anything can become the beginning of another product.
That versatility was already present when she met JBDC. Her experience therefore illustrates an important part of what JBDC’s Fashion Incubator – ‘The Fashion Place’ means.
There is no standard intervention for a creative entrepreneur. A designer with an idea may need product development before going anywhere near a buyer. An artisan may need technical expertise, equipment or help improving a finish. Another entrepreneur may need business development. Williams already had a cohesive collection, understood the intended customer and had achieved a standard of craftsmanship that Watt describes as impeccable.
Her barrier was getting the work seen. JBDC’s role was to recognise that distinction and respond to it.
Williams brought the creativity. She built the skill. She developed the collection. What she needed next was somewhere for it to go.
At JBDC’s Fashion Incubator, that can be just as important as making the product in the first place. Where does your journey begin at ‘the fashion place’? Is it product development, business development or market access? Visit www.jbdc.net to get started.
