MAG Elegance is an 8 year old small business enterprise in the creative arts sector owned by Lindener, Matoya Anecia Grant. A dyed in the wool ‘creative spirit’ she sold her first marketed piece, a Tibisiri Purse, at the age of twelve. At the time she was a student at the Linden Foundation Secondary School,. Thereafter, she took advantage of a ‘ready market’ which her Alma Mater afforded her. Purses, she says, ‘sold well.’
Early in her creative pursuits, too, she had tinkered with, dolls’ clothing created from cardboard patterns. Her academic pursuits apart, that was one of her key preoccupations during her stay in Primary school. She recalls as well, that she also pressed clay into service as part of her creative pursuits.
Quite why she pursued Agriculture Science at Secondary School was unclear to her parents. They, it seems, had always thought that her juvenile preoccupations would have taken her down a different path.
Jewellery- making had come along as a further hobby after she had completed her stay at the Linden Foundation Secondary and Mac Kenzie High Schools. By that time she had secured favourable grades in ten (10) subjects at the CSEC examination and a further five (5) subjects at the CAPE level.
Nothing, it seemed, could supress her creative instincts. These were channelled in yet another direction after a gift that she had received took her down the path of fashioning beaded jewellery. Much of what she made was used as self-adornment until allergies supressed the habit.
The end of her stay at Secondary School brought Matoya an increasing awareness that adulthood came with more practical imperatives. She worked for a year at the Linden Branch of the National Library in addition to which she served as the Instructor for the Craft Classes that were held during the July-August holidays.
In 2010, she migrated to Georgetown in pursuit of employment. As it happened, her Supervisor on the job appeared to favour costume jewellery as gifts for relatives residing overseas. She moved, successfully, to ‘corner’ and, over time, grow that market. That was her first serious excursion into entrepreneurship.
An opportunity to ‘spread’ her creative wings arose in 2016 when the Proprietrix of Junshazya Designs, Junette Stuart, invited her to a Tea Party where she was afforded an opportunity to display her work. It was at that forum that Matoya’s jewellery was ‘inducted’ into the JUNSHAZYA ‘collection’ and where the Proprietor indicated that she wished Matoya’s jewellery to be part of the wider JUNSHAZA promotional bandwagon. Thereafter, her business was duly registered.
Another valued ‘showing off’ opening was secured through Fashion Designer Sonia Noel’s Women in Business Expo.
While she was encouraged by the exposure which her creations were being afforded through her location in the Capital, Matoya was finding it increasingly difficult to strike a balance between pursuing full-time employment and ‘pushing’ her creations on a potentially lucrative market. ‘My business took a nose dive because I did not know how to balance the two – working full time and managing a business,” Matoya told the Stabroek Business.
It appears, Matoya says, that over the past three years, she has struck that balance. In business terms, ‘the numbers’ now look much better. Accordingly, she has been able to acquire upgraded stocks of stainless steel, silver and semi-precious stones which she has incorporated into her designs. Put differently, she has succeeded in adding value to her creations.
Over time and through studious research, Matoya has trained herself to cut and polish stones and to add value to her designs. At some point, she anticipates, technology that further enhances the quality of her creations will become affordable. Research has also led Matoya to learn of other materiel that can be used in her creative pursuits.
Insofar as enhancing her skills and broadening her knowledge base are concerned Matoya related to the Stabroek Business her experience of a 2021 Ministry of Natural Resources training exercise the dealt with, among other things, the use of silver in the creative/jewellery sector. Having completed the elementary and intermediate courses she begun to integrate silver into her jewellery-making pursuits.
These days Matoya is focussed on accumulating new ideas that will further enhance the creative content of her pursuits. Ideas, she says, come at any given moment and under altogether different circumstances.
Her various clutches of ‘collections have come at different times and have all been named differently to provide them with separate identities. Her Beaded Collection was followed by the Flower Boquet Collection. Having completed training in silver design in 2021 she unveiled the Finely Finessed Sterling Silver Collection. Finally there came the Gemstone Collection.
Matoya’s jewellery is marketed through Instagram and Facebook.
