FRESH from its recent acquisition of Starfish Oils Limited, Fleetwood Jamaica has set its sights on expanding its presence in the export market with new products taking the lead while it mulls a capital raise to finance a faster realisation of its ambition.

Currently, exports make up 7 per cent of total sales, Richard Coe, CEO of the 52-year old Fleetwood Jamaica, told the Jamaica Observer during a tour of the facilities recently.

“But our goal is to be a significant exporter because we know that the growth of Jamaica is dependent on exports,” Coe, a former financier, continued.

Fleetwood Jamaica, a St Andrew-based manufacturer of home improvement and everyday hygiene and personal care products, now only exports to Trinidad, Barbados, Cayman, St Martin, and the US “to a small extent”.

Its factory is based in a 30,000-square-foot facility leased from Factories Corporation of Jamaica in St Thomas, and the company is divided into three divisions: Fleetwood Home Improvements produces home improvement products such as paint brushes, roller sets, mops, contact cement, and washing brushes under the Fleetwood brand name. Orion Manufacturing Services is another division which produces personal care products under the Zimii and Top Brass brands and laundry soap under the Glory Smart gel brand and another set of laundry and sanitising products under the Smart brand. It also does third-party manufacturing and imports and distributes some household items as well. Recently Starfish Oils Limited was added to its portfolio and is the third division following a $70-million acquisition in January. Starfish Oils produces bath soaps, bath salts, body scrubs, body mists, body butters, body massage oils, and massage candles. The factory was based in Three Miles, St Andrew, but production has been shifted to St Thomas since the acquisition.

“With the addition of Starfish Oils and expansion of the product offerings under Starfish Oils, that is going to move the [export] needle for us significantly, and we know that the Zimii products, that are clearly established now in Jamaica, we have the opportunity to grow it significantly in Trinidad and Barbados and other Caribbean islands,” Coe noted in the interview with Caribbean Business Report.

He also said the company is getting interest from the US market for its Zimii line of haircare products.

“It is starting to build a reputation and people are starting to ask for it overseas.”

Top Brass, an anti-dandruff line, is its top exported product, and its Flex hairspray is “a top seller in Trinidad”.

Coe declined to offer a target for exports from his company saying that, with Starfish Oils now added to the group, it will have to sit and calculate the potential for all its brands.

“What we are going to be doing, certainly with Starfish Oils, is to build out a website presence through Amazon. The platform is the biggest marketplace for products, so what we are going to be doing is loading all of the products through Amazon and send goods up there. We are going to be selling through the Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) platform. It is going to be a lot more efficient in bringing products to market than the existing arrangement, which is a transaction website that we have, where the goods are sent to the US and we are relying on a courier to get it to the customer. That is not as efficient as it needs to be,” he explained.

Coe estimates that it will take about four months to get everything in order to get on the
Amazon platform. In the meantime, he said new products will be developed, while the Starfish Oils packaging will be refreshed just as he had to refresh the Zimii brand two times “because the packaging was just not right”.

“I think it was more about refining the packaging that we had, and I think we have achieved that now and more people are now knowing the brand,” he said of the previous refreshing of the Zimii brand.

But Coe acknowledges that getting more into exports will come with an increase in production. The company has already bought shipping containers to convert into factory space to facilitate a bigger floor space for its operation, while current manual work is being eyed for automation over a period of time that is yet to be defined.

“If we focus on automation, then getting into export markets, the potential is huge,” Coe said.

“We want to for example get into Guyana, which you know is seeing significant growth. Even the US market, there is a potential to get Fleetwood products into the US through a platform that I don’t want to speak about now, but there is another trading platform similar to
Amazon, but is for builders, and if we can get in there, the volumes could be significant,” he beamed.

He also said there are plans to add new products to the Top Brass line, which it acquired after Revlon, the US multinational personal care items company “killed” the brand.

“One is called Top Brass Plus. It’s in a shiny gold packaging and it’s got tea tree oil. It’s a new scent. It’s an improvement on the previous look and feel of Top Brass, so we are building that and just making customers aware that this is a new product by Top Brass. We are also looking to come with the Top Brass anti-dandruff shampoo. So we used to make an anti-dandruff shampoo for Revlon and we are going to be doing it under the Top Brass brand. People know that brand,” he shared.

But acquiring the Top Brass brand was not easy.

Coe, who joined Fleetwood in 2016 with the understanding that he would acquire the company by 2019, said when that time came Revlon decided to stop allowing foreign companies to have access to their formulations under licence any more. Then, Revlon’s products were manufactured by its Orion Manufacturing Services division, and accounted for 20 per cent of Fleetwood’s total revenues. The products were Fleetwood’s top seller, but Revlon was discontinuing the brand.

“So I said, ‘Look, if you are killing Top Brass,’ because Top Brass was nothing to them but it was our top selling product… ‘will you be amenable for us to purchase the trademark?’ And he said write to Revlon, and we wrote to them and got no answer. We wrote again and got no answer. So I just went on to the US patent office website and looked, it was dead. The trademark not renewed, so I just got a lawyer to register the trademark and got the trademark licence, so we now are the owners of Top Brass.”

“It’s an Amazon choice product. If you go on Amazon and you look for products to buy, some products are called Amazon choice because they are so popular, that is the category in which our product falls.”

Revlon products have been replaced by Zimii.

“It presents an opportunity for us to continue to grow a brand under our name, as opposed to making products under the Revlon brand, and so we started to manufacture shampoos, conditioners and styling products under the brand Zimii.

“Initially it was challenging getting customers to understand what we were and what we did. But now, if you go to any Fontana or Discount Beauty you will see a massive range of Zimii products on display, and if you ask most women now, they know Zimii,” Coe charged.

Now, from one truck delivering products across the island when Coe joined Fleetwood in 2016, the company operates three. Coe is actively investing in the company, mostly from cash flow, but admits that growth is limited doing so, and so he is mulling a capital raise.

In a release last month the company hinted that it could approach a broker to help raise the money in an initial public offering, but, pressed for details of that transaction, he said nothing has been decided as yet in relation to the company going public.

“The only debt that the company has is a corporate bond, and that is what I had used to perform the leverage buyout to acquire the company,” Coe said, though he declined to outline the exact level of debt.