Spice To Be Keynote Speaker At Flow Jamaica’s ‘Small Business Friday’ Seminar
Dancehall diva Spice has been booked to be the keynote speaker at communications giant Flow Jamaica’s Small Business Friday seminar, on October 22.
Spice, who was the poster girl for Flow’s Spice It Up summer promotion campaign, is expected to give participants some sound advice based on her experiences, at what will be the third seminar in the series which is being held throughout October.
October has been designated ‘Small Business Month’ in the Caribbean by C&W Communications which is the parent company for Flow Jamaica.
Spice’s participation comes a year after she stepped up her entrepreneurship spirit a notch, by launching her Graci Noir fashion brand.
According to the seminar organisers, Spice is the ideal speaker, being seasoned businesswoman herself, for many years.
The Flow programme agenda describes her as not only a recording artist, but an activist, motivational speaker and entrepreneur, and one of the most celebrated entertainers from Jamaica in the last decade.
The Cool It artist has in the past, operated her Spicy Couture stores which had branches in Half Way Tree, May Pen and Montego Bay, and which were major successes. She closed those operations, though as her overseas bookings increased and she was no longer able to handle the day-to-day running of the stores.
The St. Catherine High School old girl also has her own hair and make-up line dubbed Faces and Laces which is sold via her online beauty store. Several months ago she launched the blue box from Faces and Laces, which comprises the piano palette, the microphone brush set, the guitar face wash, and the drum cream and eyelashes.
She launched Graci Noir on October 1, 2020, in the height of the pandemic with clothing for women of all sizes ranging from casualwear to swimwear and bed wear and also menswear. Spice told the Gleaner recently that her aim is to have her Graci Noir brand “being sold in large franchises across the world” and that she would do everything possible “to get Graci Noir to where it can be”.
In a Forbes Magazine interview last month, Spice had told business journalist Lydia T. Blanco that because she believes it is important to create multiple income streams to build wealth, as a result, she had strived to establish various businesses including her label, Spice Official Entertainment, Faces & Laces, and her other ventures.
“Managing multiple businesses isn’t easy. As an entrepreneur, you have to make the best and sometimes hard decisions about hiring and firing. You can’t tag along with people who don’t have the same vision as you or share the same dream,” she had said.
Spice also said that her businesses were inspired by her poverty-stricken past and the fact that she had “been so poor and I never want to go back there”, and that as a mother of two, she was working diligently to break the “generational curse of being born into poverty”.
The seminar is aimed at empowering its small and medium business customers and helping them to grow their businesses in the digital age, and according to Flow, provides opportunity for participating small businesses to present their business and ideas to win an opportunity to pitch to an expert panel, with cash and prizes totaling US$15,000 to be invested in the successful pitches.
According to the company, the seminars are aimed at enabling small businesses to cope with their new reality, by going beyond business connectivity and offering the digital tools and “Smart Solutions” that these entities need to stay productive as they adapt and transform their businesses, as the global COVID-19 crisis continues to severely impact their operations.