Af­ter 16 years, J&K Sig­na­ture Styles has moved from its orig­i­nal lo­ca­tion in Port-of-Spain from up­per Fred­er­ick Street to a small­er lo­ca­tion down­town Fred­er­ick St.

It was not a move the brand’s own­ers Joan­na Hospedales-James and her hus­band Keron James have tak­en light­ly, but it was one that is hoped will keep the Port-of-Spain branch open for many more years.

“This is kind of bit­ter­sweet, be­cause Port-of-Spain was our first ba­by. I mean, Port of Spain was our first re­al­ly, like, be­fore we even got mar­ried, we had Port-of-Spain. Be­fore we even had chil­dren. We had (the store) and so that’s my 16 year old child, and I have to now move. It’s been very bit­ter sweet. It wasn’t a very easy de­ci­sion, but again, we are an­a­lysts at the core things, “ said Hospedales-James in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian ahead of the open­ing of the new Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

Analy­sis has been key to the busi­ness, as it has in­formed the brand’s ex­pan­sion to eight branch­es across the coun­try.

“Some­times you just have to put the emo­tions aside and look at what did the num­bers tell you,” she said.

The cou­ple start­ed the brand af­ter get­ting an of­fer to take over a cloth­ing store at the lo­ca­tion in 2009. Hospedales-James, then a mar­ket­ing man­ag­er at a bank, shaped the ini­tial ap­proach tak­en by J&K.

“I’m a busy work­ing woman. I want to go in one place and get every­thing from head to toe. And so from that per­spec­tive, we did the busi­ness plan look­ing at a one-stop shop for pro­fes­sion­al wear for women. So we start­ed off do­ing women’s wear, and we would have done that for 11 years,” she said, “Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, we would have piv­ot­ed and opened up our men’s line, start with our men’s of­fer­ing, and then start­ed do­ing men’s wear.”

James, son of econ­o­mist Vanus James, ex­plained that the vi­a­bil­i­ty and prof­itabil­i­ty is­sues faced by the orig­i­nal lo­ca­tion con­tin­ued to mount.

“Just be­fore COVID, we start­ed to see a lot of flight of busi­ness from that up­town area,” he said, “So we lost a few ma­jor banks, gov­ern­ment cam­pus (opened), that came in­to play. So we lost a few ma­jor min­istries. So the flow of per­sons who would nor­mal­ly come from up­town has di­min­ished sig­nif­i­cant­ly. “

He said the new lo­ca­tion was cho­sen for its high foot traf­fic, how­ev­er, he ac­knowl­edged that down­town Port-of-Spain has faced sim­i­lar chal­lenges, with many of down­town Port of Spain’s shop­ping cen­tres hav­ing store va­can­cies.

James ex­plained that re­lo­ca­tion was al­so in­flu­enced by the recog­ni­tion that many are fac­ing the ef­fects of a weak and de­clin­ing econ­o­my.

He said, “We need to ac­tu­al­ly achieve the sales goals to keep the lo­ca­tion vi­able. We knew com­ing to down­town Fred­er­ick Street was the goal, and we had to find some­thing that was in the heart of down­town, but al­so gave us enough space to de­liv­er the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence that we were able to do in the oth­er lo­ca­tion, and that fit the busi­ness mod­el as well. And so we had two op­tions, and this one seemed like the bet­ter of the two.”

The cou­ple is al­so not­ing that they have had to ride out chal­lenges pre­vi­ous­ly, and are aware that in most cas­es re­tail out­lets suf­fer the most in such an eco­nom­ic cli­mate.

“One of the things that we found over the 16 years is that when there’s go­ing to be a down­turn, re­tail­ers feel it first. We see when peo­ple start to look at how they’re spend­ing and kind of be more care­ful with the spend­ing. In the malls, you’re see­ing a lot of re­tail­ers clos­ing. And so it’s been a con­stant pat­tern of down­turn, peo­ple close, peo­ple come back,’ said Karen Hospedales-James

“The back­drop of all of this is it’s very ev­i­dent that we’re deal­ing with both a weak and de­clin­ing econ­o­my. So the de­ci­sions are, at this point, do you close the lo­ca­tion per­ma­nent­ly, or in this case, do re­lo­cate or close per­ma­nent­ly?

But when we ran the num­bers us­ing that base of cus­tomers that we get out of the Port-of-Spain area, it just makes sense to try to make it work. But we are feel­ing the pres­sures of this de­clin­ing econ­o­my,” said James, who al­so ac­knowl­edged that the brand had been hard hit by for­eign ex­change short­ages and sup­ply chain is­sues.

“Like many, we are re­liant on for­eign ex­change to en­gage with our for­eign sup­pli­ers, so we fo­cus on de­sign, and that means that we’re man­u­fac­tur­ing where we can do that at an af­ford­able price, and that is typ­i­cal­ly out­side of Trinidad, al­though we do some man­u­fac­tur­ing in Trinidad as well. That means we have to ac­cess for­eign cur­ren­cy. So the for­eign cur­ren­cy crunch has been a ma­jor strain on busi­ness for us,” said James,” We have to be able to be earn­ers of for­eign ex­change if we want to sur­vive in the long term and so that’s one of the ar­eas that we have found our­selves quite chal­lenged with.”

The sup­ply chain de­lays took a ma­jor toll on the brand last year, he ex­plained. “Last year, we got beat down by sup­ply chain de­lays, some­thing that takes six weeks, took six months. Not on­ly did we have to deal with ap­par­el tak­ing four times longer, miss­ing the ma­jor sea­sons that we bought them for.”

But the duo has done their best not to down­size, in­stead opt­ing to make ad­just­ments to their var­i­ous branch­es, guid­ed by the de­mand of the brand’s clien­tele.

Hospedales-James said, “We had to look at each prof­it cen­tre and see what makes sense. So we had to do some con­trac­tion. So you may have no­ticed, in East Gates, we had to close our shoe store sec­tion to fo­cus on new Menswear. In C3 where we had a sec­ond menswear lo­ca­tion, we changed it from a men’s wear to J&K Sig­na­ture Styles. We had to look at sales per square foot in each of our lo­ca­tions and iden­ti­fy, what is the best thing to do, know­ing that there is go­ing to be some con­trac­tion in the mar­ket, and it has led us to a lot of these types of de­ci­sions.”

James said ul­ti­mate­ly the J&K team has be­come an earn­er of for­eign ex­change, as he stressed the brand was putting more em­pha­sis on its on­line shop­ping arm which was start­ed in 2018.

“As I point­ed out ear­li­er, we don’t think that you sur­vive this with­out look­ing to be­come earn­ers of for­eign cur­ren­cy, and we are now ac­tive­ly ex­plor­ing the op­tion of get­ting our prod­ucts in­to re­gion­al lo­ca­tions, re­gion­al buy­ers, re­tail­ers, cor­po­rate per­sons,” he said.

“Our fo­cus is to earn US dol­lars, so sell our brand in the Caribbean, and that has been a good process. What it is show­ing us is our num­ber one com­peti­tor is not nec­es­sar­i­ly in the same mall with us. It’s Ama­zon. Peo­ple are buy­ing their things on­line, on Shein and Temu. So we’ve seen that as the ap­petite for on­line buy­ing of cloth­ing,” said Hospedales-James.

The cou­ple has said it will con­tin­ue to analyse its po­si­tion in the mar­ket and will con­tin­ue to re­sist down­siz­ing where it can. How­ev­er, it is hope­ful that its new spot will push the brand to its tar­gets.