66 August 2015 - Business View Caribbean
business in Jamaica isn’t easy.
“In Jamaica it’s quite difficult to get financing to start
a business,” says Williams. “It was a struggle in the
beginning to raise the financing. We used our savings;
we sold what we could to raise whatever we could. We
sourced two continas, we built a contina, and we built
a 1200 square foot building space. We were able to
get start-up equipment from the U.S., which was the
most basic, semi-automated equipment we could find.
It took a year to get here. We registered in 2005 and
were able to start trading in 2006.”
Williams continues the Lifespan story, recounting,
among other things, how she and Devon had to truck
water to their first “factory” to bottle it: “We did exten-
sive research on our own. The whole production ele-
ment took us a while - to get the labor together, the
source of bottles, and all that. But we were able to put
the product together and we made our first batch. The
next day we loaded it onto our pickup truck and went
to East Portland, selling to all the little shops along the
way. We sold ten cases that very first day, and from
then on we were in business.
“Within a year, we were able to purchase a truck and
the business started increasing because we were able
to carry more, and we were able to sign onto a major
distributor.” Today, Lifespan has several distributors
who dispense its products throughout Jamaica, the
Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and the
United Kingdom.
As demand grew, the company outgrew its original fa-
cility. In 2010, it acquired 40 acres of land by the water
source and, in 2011, it completed construction on a
