Babash In The DNA
A media group that believed in its marketing strategies enough to build its own businesses around the tenets it practiced. One agency grew in to 6 businesses in less than 5 years. What a rollercoaster of emotions, people, lessons learnt from the most curious of places. The story unfolds below.
We started a movement back in London, 2007, a revolution of sorts for the Caribbean themed events market. We wanted to attract the Caribbean-Londoner, middle-management, you know, a bit of disposable income, an open mind, less noise, more network. And we were successful. We hosted parties, mas bands, sporting events, theatre, you name it, we did it, but what made us successful wasn't so much the actual event, but the branding, the inclusion, the familiarity. We won at making Babash a brand that people loved. Our tagline used to be Simple, Caribbean Fun. We had fun! We had fun coming up with event ideas and fun creating ways to reach out audience. All of it in 2007, the birth year of Facebook, the height of email-marketing!
We would pull all-nighters drafting copy, working with our creative team, Dezzo, to bring it to animation life, hit send and wait. Events were always sold out, always a hit and Babash was always the brand to talk about.
After 3 years, we did our best and the team parted ways. I brought the brand back to Trinidad, to start a media agency which would lead the way in social media marketing for the next 5 years. Together with my brother and a small action team, we launched out in full force. Cold calls and all. Trinidad is, and was, about 3 years behind the curve, so making cold calls back then was the norm, some teachers still believe in it. I never did, but did it anyway. I believed that the backbone of Caribbean business was built on your network. This was the "who you know" land of opportunity. So I started doing what I knew best - making friends.
I networked my ass off. And I networked by truly living the brand I was rebuilding, telling the success stories of London over and over and over, but more importantly, truly believing that what we were delivering was unique, cutting edge, cost effective and the future of marketing. No lie told, 10 years later.
We worked with the biggest Caribbean companies across all business sectors - Finance, FMCG, F&B, Entertainment, Technology, Oil & Gas, Politics, Gaming, Media. We inspired, we failed, we grew, we learnt, we pushed ahead. We learnt 3 key points to doing business in Trinidad:
- Earn a solid reputation as a thought leader, and they will follow
- It really is not about quality, but about dependability.
- When networking, all that matters is the story you tell.
Whilst working with the greatest brands in T&T, it hit us that we too, can create great brands, that would target the markets that the big players forgot. We would become the underdog champion of business, creating spaces for others to show their work, to develop their skills, to learn and get bitten by the "entrep bug". We started goLocal, a brand, a movement, that would encompass many of these attributes and represent everything we believed in.
goLocal has, for years, been the angel brand on our shoulder. We decided to incorporate a sense of nationalism, an indomitable pride in all that was Trini, and work it in to everything we set our eyes on. We knew community, culture and children were the foundations of life, we knew we had to somehow, in our unique way, interweave these elements in to the companies we wanted to start, in fact, in many ways, companies were borne not out of successful market analysis, but simply out of an unspoken need for a service, in a community, serving a niche. Underdog champions. Remember.
This sense of service led us to the rum shop business in 2012. But not just any rum shop. The most famous rum shop in West, no, not Smokey's. Bobby's. And we went in with flair. We slapped our goLocal passion all over the place, creating an unbeatable space for musicians, artists and artisans to feel at home, fulfilling one of our core drivers of underdog champions. We learnt from working with F&B clients, how to run a restaurant and bar! We were implementing, in real time, what we were preaching out in the corporate world! And what a journey it was.
goLocal @Bobby's taught us about humility, brand & space co-existence, compassion, diversification and innovation. We brought restaurant flair to the rum shop, offering amazing food experiences, including wine tastings. I am 100% positive no other rum shop in the history of rum shops has ever hosted a certified sommelier with a full selection of wines to taste!
We documented everything, every meal was content, every drink pic was a lure, we used Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, Vine and Periscope, we pumped content out of Bobby's more than beers! That food content blogging gave birth to Caribbean Food Porn!
#CFP was the genesis of the online foodie movement, a pioneering brand bridging food and beverage content with corporate culture. We created history, again, with a daring brand that pushed the taste buds to their limits! Curry Duck competitions in urban spaces, food-focussed media content during Carnival fetes, food inclusive cultural tours, food branding, styling and media planning. You name it, we did it. Caribbean Food Porn was the brainchild of my brother, Rawle, whose renowned appetite has never left him, even in his latest food tech business, Travel Meet Eat!
During our time at goLocal @Bobby's, Jason brought the powerful concept of sport marketing to us. We knew little about Sport, but Jason, the knowledge centre, did. We knew we could create something out of nothing, because at Babash, that is what we did, best. We knew that Sport was in the DNA of the Caribbean, we knew Sport was a major influencer in the lives of kids, that Sport kept communities interlocked in love and respect, we knew that Sport was also a great business if we could spin it. And we spun it!
That year, we launched HowZzat! The first and only local sports newspaper of its kind in T&T. We focussed on community based sports that mainstream media never reported on. We also created a very unique print advertising format, taking a page out of our social media expertise. Our front pages were all about shock and excitement, to know that Pigeon racing could land a front page, or female body-building, Rifle association or Ultimate Frisbee! We were killing it with awesome content, printing 10,000 copies and distributing nationwide. We were already in the ad agency business, so we added a product to our repertoire. We had some major achievements with HowZzat, 2 of them come to mind.
We knew we wanted make a difference in Sport, in our way. We launched a "special edition" paper, and one of them was a full Queen's Park Cricket Club expose, the first of its kind. We got access to the club's most intriguing personalities, to its unique museum and so much more and produced an outstanding paper that created history.
HowZzat! also created and published the first ever ALL WOMEN'S edition. We had so much fun with this breakthrough edition. Never been done before in T&T! We were on top of the Moon!
HowZzat! offered us the experience of Print media. We worked our asses off to get editions off on time, missing deadlines frequently, but the reward was always in the production. We were on the road with our Media team, meeting associations, schools, teams, community leaders, anyone who would buy our vision and let us in the door. And it worked. Those networking skills always pay off.
Through HowZzat!, we were also offered one of the greatest opportunities to give back to the community, by being asked to sponsor the Holy Name Convent Cricket Team, and being so honored with branding rights of the team itself - they became known as the Holy Name HowZzat Big Bats, so baptised by the team themselves!
HowZzat! saw 15 inspiring editions. We opened the appetite for mainstream media to cover community based sports and give non-professional teams their spotlight in the media.
Moving around the country, visiting remote communities, speaking to people about their sporting teams, their activities, allowed us to truly connect with these areas in many ways. One of the talking points of any of our proposals has always been "what drives us". Our engine room. What makes us so different. Well. Going in to communities with a brand like Babash does nothing if not spark conversation. It is the ice-breaker of ice-breakers!
Once people knew what we did, how broad our reach was, inevitably, we were asked to help in different ways. Whether it be charitable, or opening a door for someone, we were always available to listen and respond. We were also always on the look out for new opportunities. How could we maximise our advertising in rural communities, outside of newspaper distribution outlets. We found it. Park benches and community bus shelters. And so, Sign-Age Marketing was born!
What a name! What an opportunity! We had the agency, we had our Foundation, goLocal, we had our print newspaper, and now, we were moving in to community based sign advertising! Sign-Age was set up to reach the pocket of small businesses targeted directly at their audiences in communities that were otherwise neglected. We brought corporate to the country-side in a very engaging, interactive way, as we offered custom solutions to park bench advertising and commuter shelters, which we fondly called SAMs.
We worked tirelessly to get our new company out there. We knew we had to be uber competitive, to build the right relationships and to work corporate as smoothly as we could. And we did! Our community based commuter shelters became a hit, so much of a hit that we were identified as a possible partner for our next move in corporate Trinidad - public, open- access wifi.
We offered a network of commuter shelters, which worked as perfect infrastructure for media company, ICE Media, who used our shelters to install their network of WiFi transmitters, prompting us to start OPEN - Open Public Engagement Network - the first ever open access, FREE wifi pilot in Trinidad. Andrew knew the tech inside out! I was confident in his knowledge so we went hard! No subscriptions, no passwords, just connect and surf. OPEN went on to partner with other tech businesses offering the early stages of Live Stream packages in T&T, truly paving the way for what is now commonplace in the digital marketing arena!
We had huge plans for OPEN. We laid out a comprehensive strategy to make Chaguanas the first WiFi City of the Caribbean. We went BIG! And flopped. Our clout was just not big enough to compete with the ISPs and political will at the time. This was July 2014.
By now we had Babash Media, goLocal Foundation, HowZzat Media, Sign-Age Marketing, Caribbean Food Porn, goLocal @Bobby's, OPEN. The vision was to have a media group that would represent all sectors of the market, to have sector heads who would be the thought leaders in the field, to drive and develop the businesses all under a flagship brand - Babash Media Group. We had a strong market presence, respectability in corporate circles and was growing.
I remember hosting a meeting with my peers, a team whom I believed would drive BMG to become the biggest media conglomerate in the Caribbean. The room was full, packed in our small office on St Vincent Street, everyone present were stalwarts in their own fields, men of stature in my eyes, who had full passion for what they were doing, for the value they brought to their industries. It was the last of those meetings I ever had.
In 2018 two mammoth events took place. Through a need for diversification and familial affairs, we repurposed some land in Rio Claro in April and for the first time, started growing our own crops. The intent was to grow habanero peppers, make our own pepper sauce and wholesale to merchants. We did everything in the pipeline, except wholesale. The farm is called Beepath Estates. With the potential of the farm production, we decided to open a retail store called The Farmacy, a road facing operation which took advantage of our knowledge of marketing, branding, retail, food styling and recently acquired agriculture acumen! We knew food was a huge industry, but we went back to basics, to the farm. We grew hot peppers, chadon beni, citrus, pakchoi and more, added some more local and foreign varieties, some exotic plants and started plying in St James! It was a hit! We brought sexy back to farming! We made some noise online, lots of it, used all of our knowledge gained over the years and dove right in to retail business. We brought a catchy brand name, a belief that food should be accessible, fresh and delivered with passion and matched it with our years of experience. This could not have been done without the dedication of my Sister, her husband, my wife and her parents.
That August, attracted by the vibrancy of the fruits and vegetables on display, a college friend with his 2 daughters visited The Farmacy. He was visiting from San Francisco, his family home serendipitously located a few houses down from the store. Having not seen him for over 20 years the ol' talk was sweet. In chatting, he shared his vision with me about bringing precision medicine to the Caribbean, Dexter being a PhD/MD, a big data specialist with tons of genetics experience working out of Silicon Valley!
One year later, Fzero Genomics is the leading biotech startup in the Caribbean offering the first DTC genomics kit to customers. We are breaking barriers which have not been built yet!
Fzero has brought together an unbeatable team of Scientists and Businessmen to truly change conversations about who we are and where we are going as a Caribbean society. We work tirelessly to ensure the science is accurate, ethical and cutting-edge so that we can deliver quality services to our growing customer base. Fzero has offered many people the opportunities to dig a bit deeper and find themselves, to shape their identities or craft new narratives about pre-conceived notions. We are also opening excitingly engaging conversations about the future of healthcare in the Caribbean and the very possible future of precision medicine being part of the public and private systems.
Over the last decade in Trinidad, we have been blessed to work with some top notch people, brands and companies who found common energies in our quest to do good work. Special mention to Justin and Lime.TT, who from day 1, when I offered one of my cameras to start what has become a household name in event photography, has been part of the Babash DNA, and we of theirs.
There's a resurgence of energy today in the Caribbean. The creativity has never been this vital to our economies! We are understanding that a multi-skilled person cannot afford to lapse on their talent, to be a one-trick pony. Hustler, entrepreneur, businessman, whatever the name, the same holds true for us all, in the face of adversity, diversity is key.
I have learnt to keep my eyes open to opportunity, to maintain crucial habits of success and in my moments of lapse, I fall, hard. Early morning rockstar rituals have saved me from starvation, of creativity and courage. It has never been easy doing what we do, and I don't foresee it ever being so. We continue to build upon our experience, knowledge and passions, driven to serve in the only way we know how - with open minds and hearts.
This is just the beginning.