With more than 80,000 items in stock, Giftland’s Chief Executive Officer Roy Beepat asserts that the imposing Pattensen Complex is by far the largest retailer in Guyana as if to deliberately underscore the magnitude of the achievement. Beepat does not utter the actual words but it is clear that the Giftland Mall is ‘personal,’ an indelible mark of his accomplishment of an ambition.
Still, seated in his office that is probably as large as the first Giftland outlet in Charlotte Street, he bares the persona of a man still engaged in a far from finished journey. The Complex, he says, is simply the canvas. “We’re in the process of painting the masterpiece.”
Beepat talks about the mental process that informed the creation of the Mall. “I suppose I thought like a consumer rather than like a businessman. I asked myself what would I, as a consumer, want from a facility like this. That was the kind of thinking that went into shaping the project.”
When Stabroek Business suggested that a body of public opinion felt that he was “mad” to undertake such a project in an economy such as Guyana’s, Beepat responded that he was not in the least bit surprised to hear that.
Still, he maintains that the completion of the project represents his recognition of an opportunity. He politely rejects the idea that has been articulated by many that the country lacks the urban population for such a facility. He points to what he describes as “the urbanization of shopping and asserts that the market “can probably handle two or three more malls” like Giftland’s.
Afterwards, he painted an absorbing picture of his journey – from his disappointment with the lack of support which the project received from the local commercial banking sector to the mind-numbing complexities that attend a project of the nature of a US$24 million shopping mall.
Sixty-six per cent of the funding for the project came from sources in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. He named First Citizens Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, Assuria of Suriname, the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry and Hand in Hand Trust as his biggest benefactors.
