When Melesia Adderley suddenly quit her corporate job in 2018, little did she know it would be the best decision she would make.
The mother of four had just started a new company, Women’s Haven, on the side of her busy corporate job, and despaired at the amount of time she spent away from her family, including two hours commuting each day.
“I grew tired of having to depend on helpers to watch my children and the struggle of missing out on events in your child’s life because you could not get the time off from work,” Melesia laments.
“I said, ‘I’m going to bite the bullet and try my best to survive.’ I just quit one day and moved on to a short consulting job for a small company and then fully went on my own. It wasn’t an easy decision – but I did it for my children.”
The decision paid off, allowing her to focus more on Women’s Haven, as well as running food delivery service Island Grub and assisting her husband with Kingpin Apps, where she is director of business development/digital presence management. She was also recently appointed to the government’s Business Staffing Plan Board and homeschools her four children.
“Honestly, quitting a full-time job was the best thing that I could have done because it allowed me to focus more on my business,” she says. “I knew I had nothing else to depend on, so I had to work hard, as hard as I would work on the job for someone else.”
Organic products
Melesia’s company Women’s Haven offers a range of 100% organic feminine care products, from sanitary pads to menstrual cups, to all-natural deodorant, to yoni oils and more.
The company’s mission is to raise awareness about the dangers of using non-organic traditional feminine care products, which Melesia says can cause issues such as irritation, infections and more.
“Our objective is to break the taboo and the silence around the subject of the female menstrual cycle by educating females on the importance of using 100% organic feminine care products,” says Melesia, who founded Women’s Haven in 2017 after suffering personally from irritation she later attributed to traditional non-organic pads.
After finding it difficult to source organic pads locally, and finding it expensive to purchase from overseas, she began her mission to increase both education and accessibility to Caribbean women.
“The Caribbean tends to be the last to get new technological advancement and are usually supplied with lower-grade products. I wanted to make a difference and improve feminine health of all Caribbean women and young girls.”
The company then expanded to the Bahamas, where her business partner joined, and now has local distributors in the Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. Products can also be ordered online and shipped to the US, Canada, Africa and the UK, as well as Caribbean countries.
Challenges
Despite having the educational background to back her up – a bachelor of arts in economics with business and minors in psychology and science & technology as well as a master of science in organisational learning & leadership – Melesia faced many challenges in her journey.
She found there was a lack of support as a young female Caymanian who did not come from a wealthy family. With no financial help, she invested everything she had into the business.
The difficulty of obtaining adequate finances to start, run and sustain a business is an obvious roadblock to many people’s dreams, says Melissa, who also pinpoints the inability to set up online payments as a challenge she faced.
“I remember with my first business I opened, I requested to have online payments set up for the business and they told me that I would need to have $20K put away in an account, on hold, in order to accept online payments here in Cayman with their bank,” she says. “Absolutely insane.”
Ever business-minded, Melesia is trouble shooting, researching block chain and cryptocurrency as alternate payment systems for her business.
“The blockchain space is creating a way for many persons to become their own bank,” she says. “This will be a much better way for small businesses and individuals to survive, especially with the concept of decentralised finance.”
Business drive
Melesia humbly credits her husband for awakening her business drive.
“We’ve been together for a very long time,” she says. “We’re best friends. I always wanted to own my own school when I younger, so I guess the entrepreneurial drive was somewhere inside me, and my husband helped to bring it out – I guess you can say bringing out the best in me.
As for advice to others dreaming of starting their own business, Melesia is full of encouragement.
“First thing I would say, if it’s something you love to do, go for it,” she says. “Never choose something because you think it makes a lot of money or you are envious of someone else.
“Make sure you are doing it because it’s what you want to do, it’s something you are passionate about. Once you find that, then take your time and build one brick at a time. Once you take it one small step at a time – one brick at a time – eventually you will have a wall.”
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