🎯 Lesson 1: Pick the Product and Prove the Margin

What sells here

Jamaica buys what it needs every week and what makes a day special: food and drink, hair and beauty, baby things, phone accessories, clothes, home and cleaning, party supplies, school items, car parts, gifts. Boring sells. A product people already buy from somebody else, that you can supply better, closer or with a nicer experience, beats a clever product nobody has asked for.

The three-times rule

A product business lives on margin. For a shop, the selling price should be about two to three times what the unit costs you landed — the goods, the freight, the duty, the packaging, the delivery you absorb, the card fee. For food and made-to-order, the price should be about three times the ingredients or materials, because your time is the biggest ingredient. If the numbers do not reach that, it is a hobby or a favour, not a business.

Cost one unit, honestly

Take one product and write every cost against it: what you paid, shipping, customs, the bag or box, the label, the share of the trip to collect it, the delivery, the payment fee, the one in twenty that breaks or does not sell. That number is your floor. Most people who "cannot make money" never did this sum.

Homework

Pick three products you could sell. Cost one unit of each. Keep the one that clears three times.

✅ Do this now — step by step

1. List ten products people around you already buy every month.
2. For the three strongest, write the landed cost per unit, line by line.
3. Check the price the same product sells for in Jamaica today (shops, Instagram, the supermarket).
4. Keep the one where the market price is at least two to three times your landed cost.

⚠️ Mistakes to avoid

• Choosing a product because you like it, not because people near you buy it.
• Costing only the purchase price and forgetting freight, duty, packaging and payment fees.
• Starting with twenty products — one or two that move beat twenty that sit.

🇯🇲 How it plays out in Jamaica