Gordon Tewani at his Mall Jewellers store.

The operator of Mall Jewellers, and Tropical Jewellers, and owner of an estimated 100,000 square feet of rented office space in the most prime commercial areas of Kingston, Gordon Tewani presents a compelling rags to riches story.

Born into a middle-class family of five in India in 1939, Tewani, his siblings and parents became dispossessed refugees when a huge swath of the country was carved away to create Pakistan, in 1947.

Tewani and his wife Diana, who runs Tropical Jewellers.

The family members, including sister Koshi, and brother James were forced to abandon their lucrative textile trading business. They travelled for days on oxen-drawn cart to the town of Jodhpur in northern India, which was to become their temporary refuge.

"Our parents did not have anywhere to go, so we slept on the railway platform," recalls Tewani. "It was our temporary home. We had to join the line to get ration."

Jeweller Errol Walker inspects an item of jewellery.

They eventually found what Tewani describes as "substandard shelter" with all five sharing one room, and once the proud father and family patriarch now reduced to struggling to find meaningful work.

"Our mother and father had tough time making ends meet," Tewani recalled as he sat down with the Business Observer for the Business Leader interview.

Orinthia Graham, an employee inspects a watch at the store.

Koshi, the only girl, got married at 18, and moved to Bombay with her husband who later invited the rest of the family to that city, where the government had built a special colony for refugees from the area of the country that is now Pakistan.

But even during this period of disenfranchisement, there was enough to keep Tewani's hope alive. He remembers for example, enjoying his time at a Catholic school where he learned English, which made him fluent in three languages: Hindi, English, and his mother tongue, Sindi.

Members of staff from left: Orinthia Graham, Veronica Taylor, Kenny Menghani and Donna Levy with Tewani.

Learning English helped to prepare Tewani to take advantage of the opportunity to emigrate, and to escape the poverty of a country that was still healing from racial and ethnic strife.

In 1959, Pokar Chandiram, another Indian who had settled in Jamaica, and established the House of India on Kings Street in Kingston, visited Bombay on a buying trip.

"He knew my uncle with whom he had a business relationship," said Tewani. "On that trip he said he was looking for three young men to work in his company in Jamaica. I was one of the persons he selected. I asked my uncle where Jamaica was and he told me it was near America. I was looking at the map and had difficulty finding Jamaica. But my uncle assured me it was going to be a very good place."

Under the four-year contract, Tewani would be paid £20 per month plus lodging and boarding and provided with a return air ticket to India.

The three-day journey on the propeller aircraft, with an overnight stop in London, and a stop in Bermuda was arduous.

"I was a vegetarian those days, and so I had to survive the journey on bread cakes and fruits."
He also recalls with humour, his arrival at the Palisadoes in Kingston.

"We arrived at the Palisadoes. It was a small wooden building. I saw lots of palm trees and the place looked so small that I started to wonder if I was in right city."

By the next day, the 20 year-old Tewani was seated around the counter at India House wrapping gifts and other items purchased by customers. The store, he says, was managed by Mrs Chandiram.

"She put me behind the wrapping counter to begin wrapping. I spoke English quite well - but had difficulty understanding the Jamaican language."

Tewani learned the art of selling at the House of India "and became quite good at it," as he puts. He also learned the discipline and virtue of thrift. So every three months he was able to send back £40 to his mother in India from the £60 he earned. She eventually joined him in Jamaica in the early 1970s, her husband having passed away in the mid-1960s.

"I learned a lot about business from the Chandirams, and saved £100 over the four years," he says. "I lived at the small section of a house on Waterloo Road where the Salvation Army is now located. It belonged to the Chandirams."

At the end of the four-year contract, the Chandirams gave Tewani £100 in bonus, thus doubling the £100 he had managed to save, plus the promised return ticket to India.
Tewani travelled on the ticket to the USA and Canada, but and after 10 days in North America rather than heading back to India, he re-wrote the ticket for a Kingston stop.

"I wanted to try my luck in Jamaica," he says, on reflecting.
So in 1964, Tewani, at age 25, less than £100 in his pocket, and absolutely nothing to lose, decided to try his luck in Jamaica.

"I was looking for a spot to open a business, and found one at 1 King Street, at the Henderson Shopping Centre opposite Victoria Crafts Market," he recounts of the early beginnings. "I did not have much capital those days so I had only four show cases and some shelving in the store. I started selling very cheap souvenirs that I bought from Novelty Trading."

These items included local handicraft like steel pans, drums of bambooo, Jamaican shirts, poster cards, locally produced Cus Cus perfumes, straw bags and so on.
Gordon Tewani was now in business.

Gross margins back then were fairly generous. For example, he would buy postcards for 2.5 cents each and sell them for five cents.

But with very little stock, fixed overhead, and being the new kid on the block, Tewani had to make the extra effort if he was going to succeed.

Sweat equity was the obvious approach.
"I used to keep the front door to the store open, to stay in the doorway to greet customers and invite them inside to come and look," he says. "I used to keep lots of empty boxes in the shelves to make it look like I had a lot of stuff."

Back then, the staff consisted of one sales person - Lisa Spence, who Tewani says he remembers like it was yesterday. She was paid £5 per week.

In the mall, there were seven stores - all operated by well-established businessmen including the Issas, Dadlanis, Chastinis, and Roy Moren.

"I was the first person to open shop in the mornings and when all were gone home I was still open," remembers Tewani. "I would open for one-and-a-half extra hour per day.

Those days I would clean the store myself. I did everything."
Tewani boarded at a house on Gore Terrace that was owned by a retired nurse - a Mrs Short who had worked in the USA. It was a four-bedroom house, which was also shared by Oliver Jones, who later became chief executive officer, and major shareholder of Island Life Insurance Company.

Tewani and Jones each paid £20 per month for laundry, breakfast and a room with bathroom.

It was during these early days, he says, that he began to develop the business ethos that has been the foundation for his success.

"Every sale I made I bought more stock to put into the business," he explains. "It kept on improving my business. I had two shirts, two pants, and I would wash one and rotate the other etc. I could not afford to have a girlfriend because it would cost me money."

Dinner consisted of French fries and a coke for five shilling and three pence at Maurice Restaurant near Gore Terrace. "I remember eating that same meal for nearly three years- that's all I could afford," he told the Business Observer.

The life of parsimony began to pay off, because after five years, Tewani was able to save enough so as to be able to open another branch along King Street. By then he had created jobs for eight workers.

In 1967, Tewani met his wife-to-be, Diana Maillard, a Jamaican who he married in 1969, a move that ran counter to the tradition in the Indian community to marry within the same ethnic and racial grouping.

The couple bought a house on Edgecomb Avenue, Barbican, for $37,000, with the mortgage secured through a legal firm called Judas and Desnoes. They started their family - with all three children being born in that house.

One gift that Tewani appeared to have had in abundance, was innovation. In the early 1970s he started to manufacture Jamaican jewellery, by contracting the services of local craftsmen, then purchase and market the items.

Not long after he expand the market beyond Jamaica by travelling to Bermuda, The Bahamas, US Virgin Islands, Barbados, where he took samples to introduce the products to retailers.

By the early 1970s he was able to afford a small Austin van which he would use to transport souvenirs and jewellery to retailers in MoBay, Ocho Rios and Port Antonio - stores which he said, " were engaged in tourism business".

Driven in part by this instinctive sense of innovation, Tewani later learned how to expand his margin significantly - by approaching trading companies in Taiwan - a low cost manufacturing centre - to make the goods that he was selling in the Jamaican and Caribbean markets. Then he began travelling to Taiwan to procure these items.
"Business started to grow in all directions," he told the Business Observer.

The net free cash generated by his budding business allowed this high-energy entrepreneur to begin seeking opportunities outside his core trading operation, and broaden his income base. He began to explore opportunities in real estate.

"Abe Issa had bought the Knutsford Park and sub-divided it into commercial lots," recalls Tewani of his first foray in this business. "I had $2,000 to buy a lot that was costing $10,000, or $2 per square foot. My lawyer laughed at me and said I could not get 80 per cent mortgage."

But this dogged businessman, defied the odds, and eventually found a willing financier in Blaise Trust. But as he himself was quick to point out, "the interest rate that I got was higher than usual".

Tewani then constructed a 10,000 square-foot building at 75 Knutsford Blvd, the building that currently houses Fedex.
To finance the project, he sought out an old friend - Oliver Jones - now a major insurance executive whose company provided $90,000 of the $100,000 it cost for the land, and building construction.

Once completed, the building was partitioned and rented to several companies for a combined $40,000 per year. Tenants included Jamaica Telephone Company, Jamaica Carpet Mills, Budget Rent a Car, and LA Henriques.

"At the time there were very few buildings in New Kingston," recounts Tewani. "The return on my investment was 40 per cent and I said to myself, this is good business."

Indeed. For this positive experience added more fuel to the entrepreneurial fire of an already highly-driven, higly-motivated businessman.

"I started buying more land in New Kingston," he says. "Next was on Trinidad Terrance."

This was the late 1970s and prices had escalated from the $2 per square foot that obtained earlier in the decade, to $30 per square foot.

Tewani then built a 15,000 square-foot building and rented it to Ministry of Public Service, and another of 5,700 square feet in size, that was rented to JPSCo.

The $1-million investment was funded by a mixture of equity and loan from Life of Jamaica.

Tewani was quietly entering the big league of private commercial real estate developments.
"I was young and very aggressive, and wanted to do everything," he says.

Even at this stage, according to Tewani, many friends still remained sceptical about his capacity to stay the course in this kind of business.

"Friends used to laugh at me," he recalls. "They thought I did not know what I was doing, but I knew it was the best thing that I could do".

On the way to success there were setbacks. For example, Tewani recalls how his brother who came here in the 1960s left Jamaica in the 1970s, after the Michael Manley regime began its flirtation with socialism.

He claims that he himself never contemplated leaving the island - in the mass exodus of the middle class - but offloaded two pieces of real estate he had acquired earlier in the decade.

The building on Trinidad Terrace was sold to Jamaica Unit Trust for $300,000, while Jamaica National paid $400,000 for the other on Knutsford Boulevard.

Still, for him, the sale prices represented modest gains.
In 1998 Tewani bought back the building from Jamaica Unit Trust for $37 million, and made a bid for the other - driven in part by sentimentality, he says. But there is no willing seller for the other.

"The other one they do not want to sell it," he says.
By the late 1970s to the early 1980s there was a trend, according to Tewani, for businesses to move uptown. He moved his now thriving jewellery store to the Mall Plaza on Constant Spring Road when it was build by Derick Mahfood, and also to Tropical Plaza which was developed by Abe Issa.
But the jewellery stores have essentially become an anchor for his real estate forays.

"The jewellery stores were doing well in the 1980s and I stared to invest in more land in New Kingston," he says. "The corporate headquarters were beginning to be established in New Kingston."

He did, however, also invest in downtown Kinston, paying $2.8 million for a 7,000 square-foot building at the corner of King Street and Harbour Street 15 years ago.

More recently, he acquired a plaza on South Avenue, and last year officially opened a huge hotel and casino in which he is a major stakeholder in Aruba.

Tewani says that the jewellery business is now at the mature end of its cycle, with lots of competition in the market.

So there are no expansion plans on the drawing board. Moreover, as he points out retail operation demands very close attention - unlike real estate.

"It's a family business," he says of the jewellery stores. "Every family member works in them."

These include his wife who manages the Tropical Jewellers, his son and eldest child Ravi, and two daughters, Shilini, now married and lives between Jamaica, Paris and Lagos, Nigeria, and 22 year-old Natini who is studying at a university in Miami. Between both stores, there are 40 workers.

A critical part of his retail business done through the family business, Commercial Corporation Jamaica Ltd, is customer service, says Tewani.

"We constantly stress to our staff, the importance of customer relationship," he says. "If you make the customer satisfied, you have made him permanent, not just him but his friends and family."

The consummate businessman he is, Tewani, through his real estate holding company, Tewani Ltd, is constantly on the look-out for good deals.

"I still look for good investment," he says. "I believe in investing, than having my money in the bank earning interest. My experience tells me about the safety of real estate. It has proven to me to have significant growth value over the years."

Tewani and his extended family including his mother-in law, find solace in their sprawling 10,000 square-foot home in the hills of Norbrook.

Valued now in the tens of millions of dollars, he paid a modest $2.8 million for the two-acre property 12 years ago.

"I have always admired people who have worked hard to be successful," he says. "I will continue to work as long as I have good health."

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