The Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC) is a magnet for creatives. Fashion designers and artisans come with ideas, skills and an instinct for creating, and leave with a clearer pathway to market.
Marcia Adams had that creative instinct long before she knew where it could take her.
Growing up around a family member who sewed, she would beg for scraps of fabric and stitch them together by hand. Some of those early creations were sold to family members and teachers. There was creativity around her too; Adams remembers her mother having a talent for drawing.
But the creative practice behind Beauty Lies Within began taking greater shape in 2016 when Adams enrolled at the Jamaica Foundation for Lifelong Learning to improve her academics. An art class offered on Fridays introduced her to painting and beaded jewellery.
She kept experimenting.
“As I delved more into the love for the art, I pushed myself more,” Adams said.
Acrylic jewellery, fabric and bags followed.
By 2019, that curiosity led her through the doors of JBDC for Design Fusion. The purpose of the intervention was essentially to move creatives from “I can make this” to “I can build a viable business around this.”
It would become the start of a relationship that has lasted for years and exposed Adams to new techniques, equipment, technical guidance and continued business development.
One material in particular caught her attention: cow horn.
“When we see the cow horns as presented regularly, it’s rough and rugged,” she said. “But when it’s cleaned and polished and done the right way, it’s an amazing product at the end. And it creates amazing jewellery.”
“That was one of the things that pushed me even more to go into jewellery from the JBDC aspect of it.”
Adams kept returning. She learned repoussé and later participated in Adire textile development, exploring how plain fabric could be transformed through colour and pattern.
That willingness to experiment is something JBDC Product Development Specialist, Donna-Gay Uter remembers well.
Uter, who leads jewellery-making workshops and other creative-oriented projects at JBDC, worked with Adams during the textile-development interventions and has continued providing technical guidance.
“She is willing to learn,” Uter said. “She majors a lot into fabric and from there she integrated the use of jeans with different patchwork. Her craftsmanship is great, very neat.”
Adams’ works now moves across materials and disciplines. Fabric techniques appear in bags and jewellery. Coconut shell and cow horn become wearable pieces. And when she encounters something, she does not know how to execute, she asks.
“I work a lot with her in terms of her finishing,” Uter explained. “If she needs to improve something, she will come to the incubator and I will just do a little walkthrough.”
Uter might demonstrate a technique or suggest a more efficient way to achieve the finish Adams wants. Then Adams takes it from there.
“She is quick on her feet, so when you show her something you don’t have to repeat,” Uter said. “She will go home and put what you give her into practice.”
It is here that creativity meets one of the realities of business. Knowing how to make something is not the same as having a product ready for the market. Finishing, functionality and presentation matter when a customer has to decide whether something is worth buying.
“Buyers shop a lot when the product looks finished,” Uter said.
That technical guidance has sometimes been accompanied by something even more practical: access.
During the COVID-19 period, Adams was working with coconut shell and cow horn but did not own a bench grinder needed to process the materials.
JBDC’s Incubator and Resource Centre became her workspace.
“I used to have to pack my bags, leave my home, go out there [with] my coconut shells and my cow horn,” Adams recalled.
She continued using the equipment until she eventually purchased a grinder of her own.
Adams still attends workshops, seeks feedback on products and keeps the team informed about shows in which she plans to participate.
“You can’t know too much about business,” she said. “There’s always something new to learn.”
That attitude has made an impression on the people around her.
Today, Marcia Adams’ Beauty Lies Within reflects the experimentation that has followed Adams from those childhood fabric scraps to the JBDC Incubator & Resource Centre at 76 Marcus Garvey Drive, Kingston.
She describes her creations as “one-of-a-kind, unique, sometimes avant-garde” pieces made to leave the wearer standing out in a crowd.
Her development also captures something important about JBDC’s Fashion Incubator, or as we like to call it – The Fashion Place.
Seven years after first entering JBDC, Adams is still connected to that ecosystem which promises to take entrepreneurs from concept to market through its vast range of services detailed on its website – www.jbdc.net/.
“They are like a next home from my home,” she said.
Perhaps that explains the magnet.
Donna-Gay Uter, JBDC Product Development Specialist
