“We started, literally, with $20,000 and a laptop,” Kimala Bennett, co-founder and CEO of The LAB told the Jamaica Observer at the start of this interview about her company for the Corporate Profile feature.

Bennett founded The LAB with Melissa Llewellyn, a friend, 15 years ago. The business, she said, was started in a small room which her father, music writer and producer Mikey Bennett, gave her to operate from at his Grafton Studios complex in Vineyard Town, St Andrew.

“We became 15 in November. Our journey is testament to really what can happen with just a dream and the willingness to really put in the work,” Bennett said as she launched into an interesting story about how her company got its name.

Today, The LAB is an acronym for The Limners and Bards – highlighting the creative concept of the company – but the letters had a totally different meaning when the company was first started in 2007 as a partnership.

“When we started the company, we actually started as The Production LAB with the word ‘lab’ meaning Llewellyn and Bennett,” she said.

The change in meaning was driven by her attempts to register the company as a corporation and being told that it couldn’t be registered because the name was too generic.

Then the business was mostly doing music videos and commercials, but Bennett said she only got called when the agencies had work and she wanted more and moved to diversify into the agency business and media.

“What ended up happening was, as we diversified, we wanted to branch out to not just being a production company, but to be an advertising agency as well, and with that we felt the name was a bit limiting. So we decided to [drop the word ‘production’ and just] name it The LAB, and when we wanted to register The LAB, we were told that the name was too generic so we couldn’t get the name registered.”

That was in 2014.

Faced with that obstacle, Bennett said the company put its creative talents to work to find words that would reflect what it did with the same acronym.

“I asked my [then] creative director, Andre Burnett, to find some words [that would allow us to register as] The LAB,” she said of her first creative director, who passed about two years ago. “I knew he would have found words that would capture the business that we wanted to do. And he did.”

The LAB is now an acronym for Limners and Bards which captures the artistic and storytelling direction the company was looking to go into.

But how did this all start for the woman who now sits at the top of a company which she told the Business Observer that she wants to build out into an empire?

“I always wanted to be a psychologist and went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts to study psychology [after leaving high school],” Bennett started as she brought the story full circle about her journey.

“However, when I entered my third year, I met a professor, an organisational psychologist that said to me, ‘You know, you’re always talking about how you’re gonna get me on Oprah, or you’re talking about, essentially, what was her brand’, but at the time, I didn’t even notice that was what I was doing or what I was focusing on. And [the professor] said to me, ‘I think you need to go to a film class because I don’t think you are really called to be a psychologist.’ She told me, ‘Look, you are at a liberal arts college, go and explore.’ So I opted to explore and it led me to really zone in to start doing music videos.”

That exploration led Bennett to find internship with Los Angeles, California-based HSI Productions, a music video production company, for about a year and a half. There she worked on music videos, including for artistes like Kanye West and Hype Williams.

“While I was there, my plan was to come back [to Jamaica] and start my own production company. Then when I came back, I started doing music videos and music videos turned into TV commercials, and I wanted to formalise the business, because in the back of my mind, I really wanted to build an empire,” she said.

At the time, she said the projects she was doing were small-budget projects, but she was dreaming beyond that and continues to dream until this day about the direction in which she can take the company.

“I was a freelance producer at the time, producing items for people like Brian St Juste of Timecode Productions, and for others like Delano Forbes at Phase Three. It was actually Delano who gave me my first TV commercial to do, because he was doing a project at the time, and I begged him to allow me to direct the project, and he guided me through the process,” she added as she expressed gratitude for the break she got.

“I wanted to tell stories through music videos because I am from a musical family and I can’t sing, so that was my contribution to it, that I would have directed all of Nikki B’s music videos and I was even thinking back to the now- deceased Arif Cooper, who showed faith in me,” she said. “I have done music videos for Tami Chynn, her hit, Over and Over, and videos for songs like Blaze for D’Angel, and so on. I did all of Arif’s videos and he really believed in my talents and even put up the budget in some instances.”

But while she now struts on a world stage and has Mikey Bennett, her father, to guide, she had to prove herself in her own realm.

“Contrary to other jobs where you have a business card, what speaks for you as a film director is your reel. People want to see what it is that you’ve done. So our philosophy, to this day, was really how were we going to produce a project that stands out. We focus on the production value. We always made sure that we reinvest in the project. So, if a project was, say, $250,000, and our fee was probably $30,000, I would put back my pay into the project just to ensure that it looks that much better because I knew that if I was able to produce high-quality work, high-quality music videos, then it was only a matter of time that companies would take note. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Bennett said it resulted in more work for her young company as she was determined not to skimp on anything that was going to make the production better.

“The other part of it is ensuring that the experience is that someone enjoys so it’s not just a great product, but to get to the product, the experience was seamless, being professionally done.

“We have a strong focus on original content. And I think this season of winning the ADDY awards was very special for me because it really demonstrated exactly what we’re all about. We won for Best Integrated Campaign, which meant we touched on not only print, but also TV. We also won silver for original content that we created with Novia McDonald-Whyte of the Jamaica Observer, which is a production that was conceptualised by her which we brought to life and launch.

“We’re also working on a number of projects, original content pieces, and through our Pitch Perfect competition that we had just launched, which was really looking to purchase treatments where we got over 80 submissions and we were able to select the top three films that we are going to be creating.”

Bennett said her goal is for The LAB to be the content aggregator for the region, adding that while her journey has not been smooth, it also hasn’t been rocky.

“There’s been failures along the way, and you learn so much from failing. I believe in failing forward because there’s so much learnings from that failure than straight success because you take those a lot more seriously and it gives you what people call common sense.”

She said she embraces taking calculated risks. “I believe that we should disrupt our business before we get disrupted, which means that innovation will always be at the forefront of what it is that we do. And sometimes that means that you have to step out and see how the market is changing and see how you can take the opportunity to do the things you are doing better.”

“Even for us, advertising is changing. It’s about the stories. It’s about branded content. But then we also look at we say we have so many storytellers here at The LAB, we now need to start telling our own stories. There are many Caribbean stories and so many Jamaican stories that we can tell with universal themes, but with that Jamaican flair. We have what it takes to do that. We have to take all that we’ve learned and to create a viable business model around content in Jamaica, and that’s what we plan to do.”

“We are a borderless business and we do business in various territories. I think if COVID has taught us anything is that business is borderless; because of the type of work that we do, it’s exportable. We can create here and export via e-mail, which is something that we’ve been doing. We can film here or we can film in other territories which we have done in the past.”