GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

De­spite re­cent­ly open­ing its flag­ship Min­iso store at the Falls West­mall, founder and CEO of First Re­tail Inc, Omar Hadeed, says the com­pa­ny’s lo­cal growth will “now be slowed” as the for­eign ex­change (forex) prob­lem con­tin­ues to be very chal­leng­ing.

“We can no longer sup­ply our­selves with ad­e­quate forex and we are fo­cus­ing on re­gion­al growth. It is not some­thing I would have want­ed to do. I love T&T and this is where I have al­ways seen my at­ten­tion, my pas­sion, my dri­ve. But un­for­tu­nate­ly ,at this point in time, I now have to fo­cus on the re­gion­al growth to con­tin­ue to feed lo­cal growth,” Hadeed told the Sun­day Busi­ness at the open­ing glob­al, lifestyle-brand store in west Trinidad.

That lo­ca­tion wel­comed cus­tomers on April 26, but was sup­posed to be opened since Feb­ru­ary of this year.

“This was be­cause but we did not have enough prod­uct to do so be­cause of forex re­straints,” Hadeed ex­plained.

A young en­tre­pre­neur with 17 plus years of op­er­a­tional ex­pe­ri­ence, Hadeed has been recog­nised for sev­er­al start-up busi­ness­es and pi­o­neer­ing the growth of many in­ter­na­tion­al re­tail brands and quick ser­vice restau­rants in T&T.

First Re­tail Inc opened 11 new stores dur­ing COVID-19 and in to­tal has 18 fran­chis­es-15 in re­tail and three in food.

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the re­tail con­glom­er­ate ex­pand­ed its foot­print through­out the coun­try with ad­di­tion­al open­ings of Bath and Body Works, Vic­to­ria’s Se­cret, fash­ion brand Al­do, footwear gi­ant Skech­ers, Eu­ro­pean ac­ces­so­ry brand Par­fois, the in­tro­duc­tion of a gym named Live Life Fit­ness, a new Sports and Games fit­ness-re­lat­ed con­cept, as well as rapid ex­pan­sions in­to its quick-ser­vice restau­rant busi­ness­es of Domi­no’s and Pi­ta Pit.

How­ev­er, with the dif­fi­cul­ty in sourc­ing for­eign ex­change, es­tab­lish­ing more out­lets in this coun­try will be slowed with greater grav­i­ta­tion to­wards re­gion­al growth.

As part of this thrust, First Re­tail Inc has been sign­ing on a lot of its brands to re­gion­al mar­kets. This in­volves sell­ing whole­sale as well to con­tin­u­ing to feed lo­cal growth.

“...We are fo­cussing less on ex­pan­sion of new stores in Trinidad and more ex­pan­sion re­gion­al­ly. For in­stance, we are open­ing Skech­ers in Bar­ba­dos,” Hadeed said, adding that his com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to evolve in the Guyanese, Ja­maican and St Lu­cian mar­kets.

He said he hopes to have “sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence” in those coun­tries in the next three to four years.

“We will aim to con­tin­ue our Bath and Body Works, our Al­do, Min­iso port­fo­lios through­out the is­lands first be­cause those brands for us gen­er­ate the high­est re­turn on in­vest­ment and we will con­tin­ue with the oth­er re­tail brands that we see well-po­si­tioned in those mar­kets,” Hadeed said.

This is the com­pa­ny’s first ven­ture in­to the re­tail mar­ket re­gion­al­ly.

“To as­sist us over the last few years in terms of earn­ing forex we have been do­ing whole­sale up the is­lands in some of the brands we rep­re­sent but now we will go­ing in on a re­tail blue­print.

“...Be­cause right now we are re­strict­ed by the amount of busi­ness we can do lo­cal­ly, be­cause of the forex sit­u­a­tion,” Hadeed said.

He said so far, do­ing busi­ness in the oth­er is­lands has been “far eas­i­er’ than in Trinidad.

“Trinidad is not an easy place to do busi­ness by an means,” Hadeed said.

De­scrib­ing process­es as too com­pli­cat­ed, he said, “Every­thing has red tape. Noth­ing flows, noth­ing is built the way it is de­signed to do. I don’t want to call spe­cif­ic busi­ness en­ti­ties to be as la­belled neg­a­tive in any way but I do think that most busi­nesspoe­ple in T&T can say the ease of do­ing busi­ness is some­thing the Gov­ern­ment needs to ad­dress soon­er rather than lat­er. That is be­cause it af­fects in­vest­ment and it has been a very dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od over the last few years to do so.”

Cou­pled with this, the de­lays on the port of Port-of-Spain con­tin­ue to be prob­lem­at­ic with busi­ness­peo­ple hav­ing to en­dure not on­ly lengthy wait times for goods to be cleared but they al­so have to in­cur un­nec­es­sary costs.

“There is a lot of ex­pense we in­cur for late clear­ance of prod­ucts. In some cas­es, we may have con­tain­ers of prod­ucts sit­ting for as long as two weeks in­cur­ring rental charges again which we in­cur. We don’t pass that on to the cus­tomer but that af­fects our bot­tom line and where in­fla­tion has caused us in the last cou­ple of years post­pan­dem­ic to reval­ue our po­si­tion, these things don’t help,” Hadeed ex­plained.

Go­ing for­ward Hadeed called for more ac­count­abil­i­ty.

“There are a lot of smart peo­ple in im­por­tant po­si­tions, but maybe they don’t have the sup­port.

“I think ac­count­abil­i­ty is very im­por­tant. I think maybe they need to have a lit­tle more struc­ture, a lit­tle more open­ness and di­a­logue with the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to un­der­stand how we can im­prove. As far as I am con­cerned, I think that di­a­logue ex­ists through the rel­e­vant cham­bers but maybe the pow­ers that be are not act­ing a quick­ly as they should,” Hadeed added.

Min­iso fran­chise

On why he opt­ed to in­tro­duce the Min­iso fran­chise to T&T, Hadeed said this came about as a re­sult of sev­er­al trips to the Far East be­fore the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic in March 2020.

“I start­ed to see the Min­iso brand pop up in a lot of ma­jor cities, which is a very good sign. I looked at it from a brand per­spec­tive in term of its pack­ag­ing, its as­sort­ment of prod­ucts, its price point, its aes­thet­ics and I thought it was well sit­u­at­ed for our mar­ket here in T&T and the rest of the Caribbean.

“So, post pan­dem­ic we start­ed the con­ver­sa­tion with them to bring it to Trinidad. It was ac­tu­al­ly the first brand that we in­tro­duced as a group that had very lit­tle brand recog­ni­tion but from day one that quick­ly sub­sided be­cause we saw a huge suc­cess at the open­ing,” Hadeed ex­plained.

The first Min­iso store opened its doors on Sep­tem­ber 15, at Gulf City Mall last year hav­ing to sub­se­quent­ly to close on Oc­to­ber 6 be­cause it ran out of prod­uct as five months of in­ven­to­ry was sold out in three weeks.

The Gulf City branch was how­ev­er, re­opened six weeks af­ter, fol­lowed by a lo­ca­tion at Trinci­ty Mall.

Be­fore the end of this year, a Min­iso lo­ca­tion at East Gates Mall is ex­pect­ed to be opened as well as a du­ty-free lo­ca­tion at the Pi­ar­co Air­port.

While he was re­luc­tant to dis­close how mush in­vest­ment went in­to Min­iso’s The Falls at West­mall lo­ca­tion, Hadeed said this was sig­nif­i­cant as such in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies re­quire cer­tain stan­dards and qual­i­ty in­clud­ing fix­tures and fit­tings.

First Re­tail Inc has 1,000 plus em­ploy­ees through­out its or­gan­i­sa­tion.

The Min­iso brand cur­rent­ly has over 6,000 stores across the globe in cities such as New York, Dubai and Paris.

Min­iso caters to many dif­fer­ent needs and of­fers an ar­ray of prod­ucts in­clud­ing cos­met­ics, skin­care, per­fume, toys, elec­tron­ic ap­pli­ances as well as col­lab­o­ra­tions with glob­al com­pa­nies such as Mar­vel, Dis­ney and San­rio.

Min­iso Trinidad, was re­cent­ly award­ed “Best Per­form­ing Glob­al Fran­chise Store Open­ing” by Min­iso In­ter­na­tion­al Co, Ltd.

Hadeed, who re­ceived this award on stage in Chi­na, said it was a very spe­cial mo­ment for him, putting his team at First Re­tail and coun­try on a glob­al stage.