SAY the name Tropix Apparel and most people may not bat an eyelid, but among players in corporate Jamaica and the tourism sector it is one that is synonymous with customised uniforms and a host of other apparels including caps, embroidered and printed apparels, bucket hats and watersports clothing, all in “more than 200 different technical designs”.

The company which operated out of the Montego Freeport in St James was started in 2013, emerging out of another company, VR Gifts, which was started years earlier by Ramkumar Junagadala, a native of Chennai – an industrial city of 8 million people on the Bay of Bengal in southern India.

Ahead of starting those businesses, Ram, as he preferred to be called, came to Jamaica 32 years ago seeking a better life for himself. He said he was invited here by a man, who he calls his godfather, to work – as most Indians do – in an inbond shop in “city centre Montego Bay”.

Ram said the inbond store he worked for had multiple locations at various hotels but he was in charge of one branch located at Sangster International Airport, and he also did the company’s finances. But ten years after arriving he decided to leave that business and venture out on his own to operate a business with his wife, whom he met the year after he arrived.

“I got married and said ‘Let me do something on my own, instead of working for somebody.’ We just started small,” Ram told the Jamaica Observer about the decision he made with his wife which led to them starting VR Gifts.

“We started selling chocolates to all the hotels and gift shops. Then I met someone in the US who encouraged me to also sell handicraft…so I ended up going to Bali, Indonesia, to purchase handcraft for reselling to the hotels in Jamaica.”

He said he did that for about five years then sought a market for customised embroidery in which he – manufacturing the clothing and selling them to the tourism industry – would be pitted against people who import and sell the items.

“If you go to hotel A and B it would be the same clothes in all the hotels [gift shops], no difference. The only difference is price,” he continued. “So what we did, we started to bring in plain T-shirts with no logos, no embroideries, no nothing, and we customised it for them [the hotels] according to their needs. It allowed the hotels to get better margins because they could not get that T-shirt from anybody else.”

To grow that business, Ram said he had to acquire a second-hand embroidery machine for US$65,000. New, the same machine costs twice as much. But he said when he went to the bank in 2005 for a loan to make the purchase, he was left disappointed.

“We went to the bank, we gave them a proposal, showing them what we are going to do and the cash flow and everything. It cost me US$1,500 to pay someone to do [the proposal], but I had to do it because the bank said, ‘Yes Ram, come with the proposal and we will finance it.’ The loan that we asked them for was US$25,000, nothing big because we had part of the money already from savings. Then the loans officer who said yes initially then said no, he can’t give me the loan. So I asked him why, and he said the embroidery machine that I was buying, the bank cannot resell it to anyone in Jamaica if I go bankrupt, so he couldn’t finance it.”

Ram said he was lucky his wife had a good friend in Kingston who loaned them the US$25,000 with no interest, allowing him to buy that first machine. He now has five.

Since that experience he said he did not seek another loan as he and his wife built out the business. “Every penny we make went back into growing the business.” That, he said, along with hard work saw the company expanding from a 500-square-feet factory space to now 20,000 square feet with 45 employees.

That growth included starting Tropix Apparels in 2013. “We saw a trend where the tourism business for VR Gifts was shrinking because of too much competition. I have a business in which I have fixed overheads but one youth who is 25 years old, coming to Jamaica from India, who has no overheads or staff is able to sell cheaper than me. I can’t compete with that,” Ram told the Business Observer.

Seeing falling sales and margins, Ram said he started to explore what else he could do which would have demand and give him good returns, and that led him into manufacturing.

“We lost money in the first three years. We were manufacturing uniforms for the hotels and corporates, we were making all sorts of things…which everyone else was importing,” he said.

“Hotel uniforms are basically imported so we started focusing more on corporate clients where they do not have a problem with price as long as you maintain a certain quality. And that’s how Tropix came about.”

He said the first three years were hard because he could not find enough people to sew. “There’s nobody here in Montego Bay to sew – no dressmakers, no tailors.

“I brought so many people here for interviews. I cut the fabric and give it to them and ask them to sew a basic shirt, nothing fancy, simple uniform shirts, no pockets, nothing. Basic, basic, basic. They start at 9am and finish at 5pm, and all they are sewing is one shirt for the entire day. How am I going to produce?” he asked as he illustrated his dilemma in finding skilled and productive seamstresses and seamsters.

A tour after the interview demonstrated his plight. The factory floor was half empty, with Ram saying he needs another 20 seamstresses and seamsters.

He contends that those who work in home industries, “they have their own sweet little time which they can take but when it comes to manufacturing, that doesn’t work. The more I produce, the more my costs fall and the more I can compete in the market,” he added as he outlined that finding productive people is still his biggest problem to date, almost ten years after starting Tropix Apparels.

Pointing to a desk with papers stacked high, he said “You see all those papers there? All of them are purchase orders and I can’t find people to sew. I am getting badwords from customers because I take too long.”

Ram said he has reached out to agencies such as HEART/NSTA Trust for help in getting people but that avenue has failed. “HEART doesn’t even have a sewing department anymore. Years ago they closed. They sold off the sewing machines also.”

He said he has tried to set up an apprenticeship system to teach people to sew for his business, but that too has failed because, “Nobody wants to work.”

Ram said he has had to ask for the Government to allow him to bring five people from India or Mexico to sew and said it is something he is doing unwillingly, because the talent is simply not available locally. “It’s not that we want them here, but it’s necessary.”

To illustrate, he said he has a pattern master, someone who cuts the garments into patterns before it is sewed, who is from India. At the onset of the pandemic Ram said his pattern master was back home in India and got stuck there because of travel restrictions. However, having received “a big order” from a corporate, he launched a search islandwide for a local pattern master to help and found one who charged him $100,000 to cut papers in a shirt pattern for small, medium, large and extra large shirts, but all came back with the sleeves at the same size. “How can small, medium and large shirts have the same sleeve sizes and the lengths the same?” he asked as he added that all the patterns were also of the same length, regardless of the size.

He said he has turned to training the seamstresses on his staff. Of the 12 who are currently employed, five have been with the company for several years. The others, he said, have been dressmakers in their communities but when he hires them, they have to undergo training.

“They know how to make a skirt, a basic pants and regular shirt but making uniforms is not the same. For corporates, every design is different – sometimes for different departments in the same company. Polo shirts, they can’t make the plackets straight,” he said, pointing to the area on a polo shirt on which the buttons are right below the neck.

Because of those issues Ram said he regularly loses money from his Tropix Apparel business, but covers it with funds made from VR Gifts. Now he is looking to bring both entities together as one.

“We are merging both VR and Tropix as one company – Tropix Apparels. Down the line we want to go to the Junior Market of the Jamaica Stock Exchange,” he said as he went into deep thought. Ram said he is speaking to financial advisors but did not say which entity, though he indicated that the timeline for an initial public offering is not set as yet. However, he was clear on his plans. “We want to expand from Jamaica and go down into the other Caribbean islands; there’s a huge market in the eastern Caribbean. We have done our research and we see the potential,” he said as he pulled out a calculator to work out the earnings forecast if he had a fraction of the market, and showed this reporter. The figures were eye-watering, and all in US dollars.

For now, Ram says, Tropix Apparel sells “less than ten per cent” of its output to companies outside of Jamaica, particularly in the eastern Caribbean, because “it doesn’t make sense to stretch yourself where you can’t meet the demand”, as he expressed a preference to “grow one day at a time”.

“I stand behind my products and the quality they represent. There are no sales representatives marketing them and all orders come strictly by word of mouth,” he boasts.

“I take pride in the materials I buy to manufacture clothing. If a shirt is black, it must stay black for long and not wash out after a few washes.” He said he tests the fabric himself to ensure they do not “shrink or stretch out or wash out too quickly”.

And while he acknowledges that such care means his apparel cost more than his competitors, Ram said his corporate clients are happy to pay for the quality.

“Quality is very important – I’m very picky in what I sell.”