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In a remarkable journey that spans continents, a retail entrepreneur in Trinidad and Tobago has turned her passion for hair extensions and wigs into a thriving business. After relocating to the UK with her husband, she faced the challenge of maintaining her career as an attorney while managing a new venture. Utilizing her family’s business background and the power of Loyverse POS, she has successfully streamlined her operations and expanded to multiple locations. Her story is a testament to resilience, adaptability, and the belief that hard work truly pays off. What type of business do you run, and how did your journey as a business owner start? I have a retail business in Trinidad and Tobago that sells hair extensions and wigs. The business started in 2016. My husband is part of the air force in the UK. Because of his job and of us getting married, it meant that he was going to travel a lot. I moved from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK to live with him. Due to this, it was challenging to keep my profession; I am an attorney. Since I could not be a stay-at-home wife, transferring my business to the UK would not be suitable since my husband would move a lot, and I would move with him. That is why we decided to get something that would entertain me. I have always been interested in online businesses. I started to see various options for what type of business I could open, and my mom suggested the hair extensions and wigs business. She knew several people who were doing the same business as well. I started to research, and about a half and a month later, we ordered our first box of hair extensions, and that was it; we haven’t stopped since. The business has grown really well for the last couple of years. Last December, we opened our second location. An advantage that helped me with my business was the fact that I had some knowledge about business management. I come from several years of being with my mom and dad who have run their businesses over the years of growing up. Does your family help you manage the business since you are not always physically there? No, I have set up everything. I have made the businesses independent. I have CCTV cameras. I monitor and control everything from England. One challenge I have is caused by the difference in time between Trinidad and UK. UK is five hours ahead, so if I need to arrange something with my staff, I have a few hours available to do this in a convenient time for both my team and myself. But I have managed to basically control everything remotely. What is the philosophy that you always try to follow in business? I would say hard work pays off. It was hard when we started because we needed customers to believe in our business and products. There are a lot of other sellers in the market and a lot of sellers that are scammers in the industry as well. There were a lot of nights that we could get only 2-3 hours of sleep to reply to all our customers. My husband would often help me even though he was working as well. I would get to bed at 10 pm, for example, and my husband would wake up to check all the messages that we were receiving online from our customers and register their orders. As I said, hard work pays off, and I think this is how a journey in business works. How did you come to know about Loyverse? We initially used to use another point of sale. After a couple of years, in 2022, we decided to move the business from offline to online because of the pandemic. I created an online store and was able to sync it with our POS initially. However, the synchronization began to have issues, and I could not find out where the error was. The stock displayed in the online store was not correct. This situation forced us to find another alternative. While searching, we tried several POS systems. When we came across Loyverse, it was one of the best options for us in the market. The only drawback was that it could not be synced with Ecwid, the platform we used for our online store. How has the Loyverse system impacted your retail operations and overall business efficiency? I like it because, first of all, it is a straightforward platform to use and understand. We have used customer support several times when we initially transferred everything to Loyverse and received immediate support, which we didn’t have before. I loved the fact that you can have multiple locations in the same account, and you don’t have to log out and log in to something else. The only thing that I would have liked is to see the sales report by stores in the same view rather than having to filter one by one. We have two physical locations and a website. The website is only the addition of the two locations. I would like to see a grid in the Dashboard that shows the stock in each store for each item. Are you using any of the paid services that Loyverse offers? Yes, I am using Advanced Inventory and Employee Management. Advanced Inventory is beneficial for keeping track of stock and recording everything. Employee Management has been a lifesaver, with the option of managing employees’ access rights. I have set up their role so they cannot change or edit anything. When I need to update items or some settings, I do it myself from the Back office. Initially, when I transferred my business to Loyverse, I hired someone in IT to manage the account, but we had some misunderstandings, and I could not rely on him anymore, Have you added your customers to your Loyverse account and activated the Loyalty program? Yes, I am using that at the moment. I recently activated the loyalty program. The customers accumulate points on every purchase, but we have not started redeeming the points yet. How do you utilize Loyverse’s reporting and analytics features to make informed decisions about product assortment, pricing, or promotions? The reports are really lovely. It is much better than the other POS that we used before. I like very much the shift report and the detailed breakdown it gives for all the cash movements in the cash drawer. I also use the Dashboard app a lot, which helps me quickly see the stock of all items in different stores. Is there any advice or words of wisdom you would like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs looking to start their own business? I suggest going for it. You will never know what works unless you try it. If it doesn’t work, that is fine as well. Keep on it, and you will find something that works for you.

In Trinidad and Tobago lives the chain of bakery retail outlets called Café Bean Limited, where we interviewed one of the founders who is going to share his experience developing an outdoor business model during difficult times on the worldwide level. What is your business about? It’s a chain of bakery retail outlets and distribution, a multi-faceted company that started as a chain of retail bakeries. Currently, we have 9 to 10 stores, and we offer typically what a bakery has except for bread. Because we do a grab-and-go model with usually, it is in the city center serviced in food traffic. Based on the culture we have here in Trinidad Tobago, usually, most of the people in the city center are there for work or traversing to and from home. While they’re there, they usually grab a quick bite or lunch. They would come to us for this, but if they want bread, they would have to go to the supermarket or bakery. We do not have doors, it is a street-paced business where you just stay right up and request what you want to eat and drink. We do not have doors because it decreases the friction and secondly, it increases the conversion probability. Why did you start your business, how was the beginning and when did you start? We started in early 2017. Two people started. We worked in the energy industry, which is near 50% of the industry in Trinidad Tobago since 2014 after our graduation. In that year, the loyal prices tax went from 90 to 80 USD per barrel to straight down to its lowest at $22 per barrel. A significant fraction of the economy almost disappeared overnight. We already knew the layoffs and contractions are coming. And having worked in the city centers we knew this opportunity with the first location in the capital city. Within the first stage of opening, we sold out in two hours and we realized that we had something, and from there it was scaling; from a lean startup perspective, it was a lot of “per mayor” learn. Because let’s say about 80% of the products that we tried throughout the period, we don’t longer do. But we still wanted to give it to the market to see how the market responds and make sure that we control our fair treat per seasonality or the way how is chosen to assist the customer, etc. So that’s how we would group in this particular market. Now our key competitor edge is that our systems include Loyverse. For instance, now, our incomes are significant because of several reasons: The COVID supply chain logistic problem and the Ukraine - Russia war. So that’s putting upward price pressure and that was almost 50% just this year and margins are up 30% but we haven’t raised the prices. So the priming way to maintain a margin, make adjustments in other places to accommodate the same prices. Because of the system and the model we just described, we were able to maintain I guess, a ratio, and operated in margins that none of our competitors could maintain because they don’t have technical backgrounds. I guess we're fortunate enough to make it out on the other end. That’s kind of why we started, that’s what made us into what we are today. Our model is very applicable to third markets, especially because of the price points. Just to give an idea of how cheap we are: In local currency, a cup of Starbucks coffee costs 30 TT dollars, and a cup of our coffee costs 5 TT dollars. Let’s say an average Starbucks pastry would cost 25 dollars TT and an average pastry with us would cost 8-9 TT dollars. It’s specially tailored to a more accessible price point which is certainly something that makes us popular here. How did you find us and in which way did Loyverse help you? We found Loyverse online and started using it in 2019; we truly appreciate the support they gave to us. That’s what caught us the most. One of the best things about Loyverse is the support; most of the time, companies in the US, don’t give support to the Caribbean market, and even if they do, most of the groups they’re focused on even in the Caribbean market, Miami and Latin America, are Spanish speaking countries. There are a lot of English-speaking countries in the Caribbean like Jamaica and Trinidad, but their markets do not get much attention. I guess that because the population is less than about 5 to 10 million people and the average GDP per capita is around 10-12 thousand. There's just not enough purchasing power. Usually only the last one or two will give support to the Caribbean. So that's the number one reason we will go to Loyverse, the support. Which products of Loyverse are you using? We are currently using the paid version of Loyverse. We have activated the subscription of Employee Management and Advanced Inventory. Lately, we started exploring Integrations service as we are aiming to get an inventory prediction report. What are your wishes to improve our service? I wish Loyverse would start an operation or an affiliation operation to help businesses here to overcome a knowledge gap and technological divide. Some of the bigger names in Trinidad Tobago are multinationals like Starbucks, burger king, KFC the MacDonald's Of course as franchises they would use their probationary or whatever system they use. However, for the none multinationals who would not receive any guidance, there’s a tremendous opportunity to adopt any Point of Sales provided to the local market. It’s an open field here and perhaps most of English speaking Caribbean because there is just no one, the market is too small. That’s why we use Loyverse because we get support except for others. With you, we can increase the conversion rate here, it’s not marketing but it is more hands-on. Because people may see it as other business wonders and usually business owners are not that technical, I would say. 98% are not technical at all. They might see it and like it, but the friction from seeing to conversion would just be too much, they would need someone to onboard them, pitch it to them, and pilot their existent location to show the advantages and how easy it is. I think there can be certainly within the thousand of adoptions in Trinidad to possibly the low 5 figures or 10 thousand just in Trinidad because they need it. Right now most of the bookkeeping, tracking, and sales records are done by the head. Most people have active smartphones with data plans and the internet because they are very addicted to social media. So the infrastructure to move to a digital POS system is there, is to get them to adopt it. Thank you very much for your time.