Junette Stuart is not simply starting out in the business of fashion design. Having re-tooled and re-strategized she is starting over on the advice of her personal tutor, Anna Gburezyk, who had been assigned to mentor her throughout an intensive year-long correspondence course at the University of the West Indies’ Chairee Blair Foundation and has shifted her attention to pretty girls’ dresses.
That programme having ended in 2013, Stuart is now a certified mentor for women seeking help to devise strategies to enhance their revenue intake mostly by re-working their marketing strategies and diversifying their businesses to meet market demands.
Stuart’s particular areas of expertise are fashion and interior design – soft furnishings including curtains, slip covers and cushions.
Stabroek Business found Stuart in the Main Street Avenue on the eve of Emancipation Day surrounded by a wide range of clothing and artifacts: girls’ dresses, African caftans and dashikis, hand-painted and tie-dyed dresses with a distinctive Guyanese flavour and adult dresses in the fashionable colour block style.
This year marked her first appearance on the avenue. She was part of a lively bazaar comprising vendors offering just the kinds of costumes in which Guyanese would bedeck themselves for their treks to the National Park last Saturday. These tented entrepreneurs had all earlier shared with us their plans to move to the National Park the following day, Emancipation Day, taking their clothing with them.
Last Friday, business was as bright as the afternoon sun. Stuart had done well in the avenue but said that an earlier commitment to an EMPRETEC event would keep her away from the National Park the next day. She told Stabroek Business that this year’s 6-day Venture Out programme had reinforced the knowledge she already possessed. She believed, she said, that the bedrock of an expandable business was its network of potential and existing clientele. She had worked to
