Roxanne King: A model entrepreneur with a resilient spirit

By Danielle Campbell

Dancing and sewing are two of Roxanne King’s innermost passions. In fact, she is lucky enough to have her two favourite pastimes as the professions from which she earns her upkeep. King has had her fair share of good and bad experiences, but they have only served to fortify her resilient spirit and prepare her for life as a model entrepreneur.
She is a fourth-generation seamstress who developed her innate skill to manufacture neatly-designed pieces. But King was not always successful. She started working at home as a seamstress in 1987.

“My mom was a dressmaker and her mother and grandmother were all dressmakers, so I guess it’s one of these things that run in the family,” King said. She explained that her mother had 10 children and so sewing for her was limited to family members and not for commercial purposes.
At around age 22, King began teaching and dancing at the National School of Dance and it was then she discovered that leotards (a unisex, skintight, one-piece garment wore by gymnasts/ dancers) were extremely hard to source.
“I ended up sewing one for myself and after a few tries, it came out just perfect. Everyone was asking me where I got it and I eventually had to sew leotards for my friends. I was even being called the leotard girl, because some people didn’t know my name.”
When King realised she was producing leotards of an exceptional quality, she began feeling confident as people were pleased with what she was manufacturing. “At one time, all I wanted to do was sew and after I recognised that there was a growing demand for leotards, I was happy to supply them,” King related.
She pointed out that the National School of Dance had various classes including the preliminary, starters, and intermediary stages, and each class had about 20 students.
According to her, by the time she had made enough leotards for one year, it was time to begin making them all over again to meet the demand the following year. King soon found out that the market was not that lucrative in the Newtown community in which she lived. So she decided that if she was in a high-traffic area, she would be able to attract more customers. It was then that King boldly stepped out and acquired a stall at the Merriman’s Mall with a signboard saying simply, “sewing done here”. By then, she was teaching at the dance school in the morning and running the sewing shop in the afternoon.
Although fully aware of the risks involved with opting out of a sure paying job, King later decided to leave the dance school after her first year in business and launched out into the deep.
“After a while, I was getting the customers and was doing fine. I did spoil a few things, but the trial and error was helping me to become perfect,” King recalled. Someone suggested that she approach the Guyana Stores Limited (GSL) and she reluctantly complied and was blown away by the response.
“I didn’t think that they would purchase local stuff from someone who was using a regular domestic machine. I was better advised on how to label it, and after a few corrections, they started to purchase my leotards,” King said.
At Fogarty’s, she was told that orders for school supplies and leotards were placed in Trinidad and Tobago, but to King’s amazement, the order for leotards fell through. King was immediately given the contract to fill and took six weeks to complete the task and supply the order.
During those weeks, it was a wow moment for King. She tells how she was blown away by the fact that a simple person such as herself could have secured a major contract from “big name stores”.
However, with every successful business venture, challenges would arise and King soon found that her simple machine did not have the capacity to produce over-edges and other neat finishes. After a year, her circumstances propelled her to purchase a more complex machine and that she did.
“I realised that I could do more work in a shorter space of time and have a better quality finish to the clothing,” King pointed out. As she became more and more confident, she began to sew school uniforms and over the years, King realised that she could sew just about anything she put her mind to.  “My talent is natural. Since I was six, I was always trying to sew. By the time I was eight, I had a needle in my finger. I would take the scraps from my mother’s sewing and make clothes. I started with the really simple things and as I mastered that, I would move on. Once you have an understanding about sewing, the rest comes easy.”
Since then, King has been constantly supplying Guyana Stores Limited and Forgarty’s with leotards and uniforms for various schools around the Georgetown district.
“After a while, my stall could only hold two of the machines and so I bought a double stall next door and later acquired another one when it became available.” King had acquired three stalls in the space of three years.
Today, King has eight heavy-duty machines and six persons in her employ. She has also purchased other labour and time-saving devices, including a heavy-duty cutter that allows her to tailor-make dozens of clothes at one time.
However, her challenges did not end there, and soon she began experiencing difficulty with sourcing materials locally. “This was around the time when most of the cloth stores on Regent Street moved to selling readymade clothing and I had a great difficulty getting cloth and definitely wasn’t getting the spandex which is used to make the leotards, gym wear and swimwear,” King disclosed.
By then, the demand for leotards had reached fever pitch and everyone was in a frenzy trying to source them. King journeyed to Trinidad where she found the spandex material, but it was very expensive and resulted in a doubling of the cost to consumers.
Not daunted by this reality and not one to accept situations that can be changed, King received information that the material could be sourced at a cheaper price in neighbouring Brazil. “I learnt I had to journey 13 hours to Lethem and then another 13 hours by bus to Manaus. After a year of contemplating it, I persevered in my mind and made the trip.”
King was able to constantly supply the market demand and was also able to significantly reduce her cost. She has been travelling to Brazil every year since then and even began bringing gym and swimwear materials.
“Because of the leotards, I was pushed into all those areas, including supplying all those school costumes at Mashramani time. Generally, we start producing those early in December and we ensure that we have all sizes and all the colours for the children”.
One of the marketing techniques King learnt as an entrepreneur associated with Empretec was to always ensure that whatever she produced was always in stock. Explaining her association with Empretec, King said as her staff complement grew, she realised she needed to acquire training in managerial skills and enrolled in the programme.
“I was taught at Empretec that there is a solution to every problem and my task is to find those solutions. We are only taught four directions in life: east, west, north and south, but at Empretec, we learn that in business we can also go south-east and north-west and all the little spaces in between.”
King has also completed the dance teacher’s course. “These are two things I wouldn’t trade for the world. Even if I leave this country and go somewhere else, I would always be sewing and dancing as long as I have the strength.” She now supplies local designers such as Michelle Cole, Carol Fraser and Olympia Small and produces outfits for athletes who crave designer spandex wear. “They really pushed me into the directions I didn’t even know I could go.”