well until a major hurricane swept through Jamaica in 2005. In the aftermath of the storm, Edgechem’s sales plummeted. Even more perplexingly, competing paint companies continued to make good profits. It was a puzzle the company had to figure out quickly. Edgechem’s General Manager, Mellissa McHargh explains what the company’s market research revealed: “If you understand how the automotive paint industry works in the Caribbean, most of our garages are open air, or ‘under-the-tree’ as we call them. When you have had a hurricane and the air
is still moist, it is not conducive to repairing the paint job on a car. So that was why our sales fell. “The only difference between us and our competition was that they had decorative products. After the hurricane, all the people were repairing, so our competitors had a boost in their decorative sales to carry them through. That was when we took the decision to create our own decorative line of finishes, to provide some stability if anything like that ever happened again.” Edgechem did not count on its precautionary measure taking on a life of its own.
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