Latest / Talk Commerce / From Caribbean Roots to Digital Growth The Evolution of Sam's Caribbean Marketplace
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.442) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Melissa Morris. She is with Sam's Caribbean Marketplace, a Caribbean Jamaican marketplace in New York. Melissa, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your role. You gave me three roles, but tell us a couple of your day-to-day roles and one of your passions in life. Melissa Morris (00:19.293) Yes. Okay, awesome. So thank you so much for having me, Brent. So my name is Melissa Morris, as you said before, and I am the manager of marketing and new business developments of my family's business, which is Sam's Caribbean Marketplace. We're located in West Hempstead, New York. That's in Long Island. And we've been around for going on 33 years. So we're in our... 33 years will be in December. So that's pretty exciting. So I actually started working in the business since I was 14 and I'm now 28. So 14 years, I guess, of experience there. I started off doing basic functions like packing the shelves and just little things. I remember when I was seven, I would go around the register just for fun to pretend like I'm bringing up customers. So I fell in love with the business since I was a child and my father asked me to work in the business just for the summer when I was 14 and that's how I got started. I'm also a adjunct professor at a local college and I do have another role in healthcare marketing but I don't want to say all of these things because then I'll just go down a whole list of things that I do. Brent Peterson (01:44.376) That's great. And how about passions? Anything outside of working and marketing and all the other things you're doing? Melissa Morris (01:49.56) Yes, absolutely. So for my passions, I would say that if I could just be an artist and just sit on a beach somewhere and just paint and make millions of dollars, I would do that. So I do love art. love also in terms of fitness, do like Pilates as well. That's something that I try to stay up with. And let's see. Music, I do love music. I love listening to music just in my free time as well. Brent Peterson (02:23.234) That's awesome. Thank you for that. All right. So, just before we get started, I'm going to do this thing called the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating eight through 13. So here we go. I'm in search for someone to assist me with milking cows at my dairy farm. Must work well with udders. Melissa Morris (02:47.449) I love it. That's a 13. I love it. Brent Peterson (02:52.162) That's great. Thank you. All right. So I'm going to share my experience because we had a family business as well and we got our kids started in their teens. I'm guessing my son was in his early teens and just was doing Q &A work for websites. So tell us what was it like? I I think, you know, my kids have also grown up and gone on to hopefully bigger and better things. Tell us about your Melissa Morris (03:11.704) Awesome. Brent Peterson (03:21.418) early experiences with working in a, in a store like that. Melissa Morris (03:26.032) my goodness. So my early experiences, it was definitely a fun experience. But then I think as a kid growing up in a business, you end up seeing a lot of things that adults typically would not necessarily bad things, but I feel like working in the business as a teenager made me a little bit more. professional now as an adult because I do know how to handle certain situations that maybe even some of my peers might struggle with. I have to keep up with my work ethic, make sure that I'm on time, even though sometimes I'm not always on time, but I try to be. And just a few other things. I think that when you work in a business as a kid, Again, you just learn so much. I've learned so many skills throughout the years, and I think that's something that I really am happy about. And I'm glad that I'm able to continue to hone in on these skills as well. Brent Peterson (04:35.502) So, know, my thought about when I look at the pictures of the store and things like that are that this is a local business. not, you know, probably don't have a website or it's a rudimentary site, but you actually have a very in-depth site and very, there's a lot of stuff there, a lot of stuff to purchase. How were you involved with the process of going on the internet? Melissa Morris (05:01.28) Yes. So originally my dad, think this is back in the early 2000s, he created a website and we were using that site for years up until last year, actually 2024. And the thing is, my dad, put me in charge of pretty much rebuilding the website, revamping it and making it more modern. So We had to take so many products, it's over a thousand products, and put them into Shopify actually. That's the template that I went with because Shopify was just an easier interface for us. At first, my dad wanted to build a website from scratch and use developers, but that would have been super expensive. So I was able to convince him to use Shopify. and it's been going really well ever since. So yeah, good stuff. Brent Peterson (06:01.13) How have you been able to the food part of the business and the recipes and some of the pictures I'm seeing? I'm already getting hungry. How have you been able to convert or connect some of those things to the online sales? Melissa Morris (06:11.449) Yes. Melissa Morris (06:18.402) definitely. Okay, so pretty much right now we're working, we have our grocery items available for sale, which is like the seasonings, the breads that we sell. We also sell Jamaican patties, whether it's beef patties, vegetarian patties, and items like that, pepper sauces. But we also have a restaurant and we're working on integrating our restaurant. menu into the Shopify template. My dad is really working on that and he's, you know, up all night trying to figure this out. So that is something that we are working on right now. So soon customers will be able to order their meals through our website and that would be amazing. Brent Peterson (07:05.291) Yeah, that's super fun. Melissa Morris (07:06.714) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (07:08.852) What sort of things have you seen in terms of food and people that like this certain food that they're looking at? Melissa Morris (07:17.442) Absolutely. So I would say that our customers, they just love our service and they also love the food that we produce along with the groceries that we sell. So even if someone isn't interested in making their own meal, they'll eventually be able to purchase meals like our oxtails, we have dirt chicken, curry goat. so many different Caribbean cuisine that we carry. And also we're working on expanding our menu as well to maybe try some different fusion foods so we could throw in different cultures and also, you know, be able to sell these items to our customer base. Brent Peterson (08:08.312) From a marketing standpoint, what sort of challenges have you seen in helping to get your word out and getting it past the local market into the broader market? there anything, is there specific challenges you've experienced? Melissa Morris (08:23.264) Yes, definitely. So when our website was not as up to date, we had customers who are, you know, not local in New York. We had a really strong base, but customers started to fall off because our website was literally terrible. It was so bad. There was a lot of glitches. The shipping costs would be some outrageous cost and then customers would see that and say, whoa, I'm not paying, you know, a thousand dollars for shipping. So they would just, you know, leave the items and probably go to a different company. So that is why we really wanted to focus on building a new site. And that took us about two and a half years to get all of that together. So now customers have a more user friendly experience as opposed to the past. But also customers were able to call in if they were having issues online and we would be able to put these orders together manually. And then we'd be able to process that that way. now they don't have to take that extra step to call. It's just more seamless at this point. Brent Peterson (09:36.972) You use a lot of video and great images on your site. Have you seen success in the amount of video you're doing on some of the landing pages? And I clicked on the just dropped section, and there's a great video of somebody explaining. I don't have the sound on, but tell us about the idea about the amount of video and images and all the other fun things you have going on on the site. Melissa Morris (09:55.78) clear. Melissa Morris (10:05.164) Absolutely. So I do have to credit my dad for really integrating a lot of the videos. I was responsible for most of the pictures of the products that you see. But my dad, loves videos and he knows that that is something that will attract users. Typically, when we had our old site, it was very static. There was just maybe one little blurry picture and nothing else. So now having all of these videos and all these different animations, we find that customers are spending a longer time on our site as opposed to the old site, which was like a, ooh, this is a little shocking. And then them leaving, now they're spending more time. And eventually that's converting into spending on the site, which is great. Brent Peterson (10:55.246) One of the things that, I, is there, well, let me just back up. Is there a specific Jamaican made items that you found, that you find that Americans have discovered that they really like, that you've been able to have success with? Melissa Morris (11:12.53) my goodness, I love that question. I would say that, hmm, okay. So something that Americans typically really enjoy would be, I'm going into the food, even though the food is not available right now, it's our stewed oxtail. That's something that they love. But then also the beef patties and the vegetarian patties that we carry on our site right now. People love those. They're just, especially like the little cocktail ones, they're great hors d'oeuvres, you know, just quick, easy bites. You're hosting a party, could just grab one of those and it's just great for the guests. So I would say our patties, our oxtail, and then also the pepper sauces. Some people, they've done like little challenges with the hottest pepper sauce. So I've seen, especially some of our younger customers come in and purchase, you all these different levels of hot sauce. And they say that they're doing challenges. So I think that's pretty fun too. Brent Peterson (12:20.596) And tell me about the bread and butter, the, I'm sorry, the Sam's Bread and Butter Express. Melissa Morris (12:26.937) It's okay. Melissa Morris (12:30.616) Yes, it's a mouthful. It's our door-to-door delivery service that's available in Jamaica. We do, of course, deliver throughout the United States and especially in New York, but we wanted to expand to Jamaica because we noticed that customers were asking about it. one of my, I remember this like it was yesterday. I was at the register and a customer was asking, hey, can I send groceries to my relatives in Jamaica and you guys just deliver it to their homes? And I was like, no. And at this time I was in high school, maybe I was like 17 or so. And I was like, no, that's not something that we do. And one of my coworkers asked me, he said, why don't we do that? Because that would be a great idea. And I thought about it and I was like, okay, I need to tell my dad this because that actually does make sense because a lot of times, Caribbean people here, they send either money or goods down to their relatives, you know, back home. So why don't we help facilitate that? So doing that, I asked my dad, he said, hmm, that's something that he'll look into. But he at first was like, what? You know, we get it, but we were trying to figure out how we could do it. So we finally figured out a way to do that. And now customers are able to send grocery items, whether it's your relatives or you're in Jamaica and you need groceries delivered to your hotel room. We can do that for you. Brent Peterson (14:04.174) That's amazing story on how you've been able to innovate outside of that. It would be sort of like somebody from England ordering groceries from America for somebody in England. Melissa Morris (14:15.727) Yes, I know it's pretty crazy, but customers in England can actually order groceries for their relatives in Jamaica as well. So it's international. Brent Peterson (14:24.534) Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. So what is your outlook on business now for the rest of the year? And I guess have the tariffs affected you for getting your products into the US? Melissa Morris (14:39.738) Okay, yes, that's a great question. So right now with the tariff situation, we're still a little bit uncertain. We've had to raise certain prices, not necessarily pertaining to the tariffs, but kind of sort of, but hopefully we don't see too many price raises on our end. So we don't have to transfer that to the customer. We may have to, which is unfortunate, but we're trying to keep our products as cost effective as possible. And overall outlook for the business, I would say that thanks to our new site, we're experiencing a lot of new customers coming to our website and we're getting new people just interested in what we have to offer. So. It's looking bright, but hopefully we can keep those costs down. Brent Peterson (15:40.568) How often do you have a steel drum band in the store? Melissa Morris (15:43.618) my goodness, I love that. So for our steel band, we typically do that for our customer appreciation day. That's a day that's in June where we just have a big party for our customers. We have a lot of different sales. It's actually one of our most chaotic days. It's just like a whirlwind of things going on. At one point we used to have a patty eating contest, was super fun, but we haven't done that in years. But we have a live band, the steel drums, and also a live DJ as well, just celebrating our customers and just showing our appreciation. Brent Peterson (16:26.73) Is there anything from island living culture that your dad's been able to kind of get into you and do you spend much time in Jamaica? Melissa Morris (16:34.628) my gosh. Okay. Yes. I love that question. So I don't spend as much time in Jamaica as I'd like to because the plane tickets can be so expensive. But I was there in January and I spent some time with my cousins and I absolutely love it. I do love island living. I just love nature, especially and being able to maybe go to a river and you know, just do little rock climbing and nature. It's just so much fun. So something that my family overall has passed down to me, I would say is cooking. I love to cook Jamaican food and it's just something that I enjoy doing. So knowing that I can cook some of these recipes and that some of my elders have had them, that makes me so happy that they enjoy it as well. I feel like I'm doing something right. Brent Peterson (17:27.814) That's awesome. Melissa, we have a few minutes left. And as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Melissa Morris (17:37.882) My goodness. Okay, so if anyone wants to follow me on LinkedIn, it would be Melissa Morris, MBA. And I don't know if you'll see my image, but if you do see it, it's me. So you could definitely follow me on LinkedIn and we can connect through there. I think that's pretty much it. and my family's business, website is www.sams24-7.com. If you'd like to check out any of our items that we have, sams24-7.com. Brent Peterson (18:16.334) That's perfect and I'll make sure I get those on the show nuts. Melissa Morris, the marketing and all kinds of other roles with sams24-7.com, a unique marketplace in Long Island, right? Long Island, New York. Thank you so much for being here. Melissa Morris (18:19.226) Thank you. Melissa Morris (18:29.016) Yes, Long Island, New York. Thank you so much, Brent. Appreciate it.