Jamaica is turning a ship in a sports car world

AFTER more than 20 years in politics, building a global business has given me a different vantage point on something I spent years debating in Parliament: How value is created, moved and captured. I now sit inside a global value chain, sourcing across borders; manufacturing in Italy; moving inventory into different markets; navigating freight, duties and regulation; negotiating distribution; managing margins and cash flow; and understanding what makes a customer discover you, trust you, buy from you, and come back. Seeing that machinery from the inside has sharpened something I believed long before I entered business: Jamaica has to think globally and act locally.

In politics an announcement can become an event. In business, nobody particularly cares what you intend to do. From the beginning I made a deliberate decision: Although its founder and CEO is Jamaican, my skincare would be formulated and made in Italy where I could access the science, formulation expertise, clinical testing, and manufacturing standards necessary to compete globally and build for scale.

Outside Jamaica, nobody particularly cares who you are in Jamaica. The world doesn’t owe you shelf space. Therefore, I positioned the company inside the markets where I intended to compete, including launching in New York.

And the questions I spent years in Parliament asking about Jamaica became even more urgent: What do we make? After everyone along the value chain has been paid, how much of the value created actually comes home to Jamaica? What has changed is my vantage point.

I’m no longer examining those questions only through the lens of public policy; I’m experiencing them from inside a business competing in the global economy. Jamaica has done difficult and necessary work to stabilise its economy. We have substantially reduced our debt, unemployment has fallen to historic lows, and our macroeconomic credibility is stronger.

But stability is the foundation on which you build the house. Eventually, you have to build the house. In 2025 Jamaica imported approximately US$7.5 billion in goods and exported US$1.65 billion.