Sean Nero

Dean Ackin, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of mas band Tribe is the new queen mak­er in town. On Thurs­day, he re­ceived and ac­cept­ed doc­u­ments from Miss Uni­verse Inc, cer­ti­fy­ing the band as the new lo­cal fran­chise hold­er, and he im­me­di­ate­ly is­sued a call to the beau­ti­ful women of T&T in­ter­est­ed in be­com­ing a Miss T&T to pre­pare for the screen­ing.

"The plan so far is to have both the cast­ing and the fi­nals in Sep­tem­ber this year. It may be the first week in Sep­tem­ber to host the cast­ing and maybe the last week in Sep­tem­ber to host the fi­nal," he said. The fi­nal of the Miss Uni­verse 2012 is ad­ver­tised for De­cem­ber, but the coun­try and venue are yet to be de­cid­ed.

Tribe was grant­ed the rights fol­low­ing the sub­mis­sion of its im­pres­sive Car­ni­val and cor­po­rate re­sumes, as well as rec­om­men­da­tions from pre­vi­ous fran­chisees Pe­ter Elias and Ian Lee. Lee, who is a Tribe as­so­ciate, was the pre­vi­ous queen mak­er. But Tribe's in­volve­ment in prepar­ing a Miss T&T Uni­verse for the world stage is not new.

Ackin once served on the ad­ju­di­ca­tion pan­el to se­lect a can­di­date, and his com­pa­ny Ul­ti­mate Events pro­vid­ed lo­gis­ti­cal sup­port for the stag­ing of pre­vi­ous pageants. For­mer Miss T&T Uni­verse del­e­gates La Toya Woods and Gabrielle Wal­cott wore Tribe cos­tumes for the in­ter­na­tion­al pageant. Last year, Wal­cott placed sixth out of 86 del­e­gates.

"It's a tri­umph. I don't want Tribe to be con­sid­ered a band, but a brand. This is just one of the ways that Tribe as a brand will be step­ping out­side the bound­ary of Car­ni­val to lever­age its brand and good name and lend it to oth­er ven­tures. "T&T has a rich his­to­ry with re­gards to suc­cess in the Miss World and Miss Uni­verse com­pe­ti­tions. We have beau­ti­ful peo­ple in our land. For such a small na­tion we have Janelle "Pen­ny" Com­mis­siong Chow, Giselle La Ronde-West and Wendy Fitzwilliam.

Many of our oth­er del­e­gates have done very well," Ackin said. He was of the be­lief that with the Miss T&T Uni­verse fran­chise un­der the Tribe ban­ner, chal­lenges re­lat­ing to spon­sor­ship might no longer be an is­sue. Tribe, he said, in­tends to raise the lev­el and stan­dard of the com­pe­ti­tion and ul­ti­mate­ly its im­age.

Ac­cord­ing to Ackin, "We have a wealth of ex­pe­ri­ence in event man­age­ment. We have a wealth ex­pe­ri­ence in mod­el man­age­ment. We have the re­sources and tal­ent in house. So it was an easy de­ci­sion for us to make. Ackin said Tribe was ready to bring home an­oth­er Miss Uni­verse ti­tle.