Cherisse Moe

Shop­ping for styl­ish clothes can be a recipe for stress and headaches. But Keron James, 32 and his 30-year-old fi­anc� Joan­na Hospedales have come up a win­ning for­mu­la with J&K Sig­na­ture Styles. The se­cret in­gre­di­ents? Great cus­tomer ser­vice, a pleas­ant shop­ping ex­pe­ri­ence and com­fort­able, af­ford­able women's cloth­ing. The Tu­na­puna-born, Tacarigua-based co-own­ers in­sist that there's more to their cloth­ing store than meets the eye.

Born out of a need to "fill a void" in the lo­cal cloth­ing mar­ket as it re­lates to women's pro­fes­sion­al wear, J&K opened its doors in No­vem­ber and the feed­back, thus far, has been "ex­cep­tion­al." Sit­u­at­ed in the heart of the cap­i­tal city, at No 92 Fred­er­ick Street, Port-of-Spain, the store, which had been in the wood­works for about a year, has seen an in­flux of cu­ri­ous and sat­is­fied cus­tomers, and word is spread­ing fast.

"Our fo­cus is to pro­vide a nice en­vi­ron­ment and a great cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. So far, peo­ple love the clothes," says James, a grad­u­ate of New Or­leans Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law. Cater­ing to sizes ze­ro and up, J&K has a cus­tomer base rang­ing from politi­cians to the woman on the street. Co-owned by James' younger broth­er Kofi, the store al­so of­fers women's hand­bags and ac­ces­sories to com­plete the pro­fes­sion­al look.

With a mind for busi­ness and an en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it, James, an en­ter­tain­ment lawyer who al­so co-man­ages his fam­i­ly busi­ness–Mil­len­ni­um Prop­er­ty Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd–is al­so known for his vo­cal skills in the R&B and groovy so­ca gen­res. Hospedales, a 2001 UWI grad­u­ate and for­mer mar­ket­ing man­ag­er at Re­pub­lic Bank, adds that spe­cial fe­male touch. Sat­is­fy­ing the cus­tomer, she says, is al­ways on the front burn­er.

"Peo­ple like the at­ten­tion they get and they're al­ways com­ing back. We place our cus­tomers' names on our data­base and we alert them when­ev­er we have a sale or new ar­rivals. We al­so have month­ly ac­tiv­i­ties ...There's al­ways some­thing spe­cial go­ing on." So, what's next for the en­gag­ing pair? "We do see a few ar­eas where we could ex­pand. It's been a re­al­ly good ex­pe­ri­ence and we just look for­ward to where we go from here."