Educating Octavia

Octavia Randolph's business began as many do: with an idea unsupported by experience. She fell in love with a product she didn't know how to make, package, or sell. So she began at ground zero and spent two years on self-education. Now, her Caribbean-inspired snacks are ready.

A man and a woman lie on a Caribbean beach under a penetrating sun. They are on seasonal parole from icy Boston to the island of Nevis, where the light and colors are as fresh as the fruits and vegetables the land offers. The woman is an architectural preservationist -- with a career in need of some serious restorative work. Her job has become too many drawings, too much consulting, and too few real buildings. She wants to make something she can touch, feel, and hold. Here, on her first trip to the Caribbean, she feels alive, her senses quickened by the colors and the dreamscape of the beach. She remarks on this to her husband -- and by the way, she adds, slicing another mango, somebody should start a business packaging all this beautiful produce and importing it to the United States.

Cut to New England, two years later, the winter of 1989.

Octavia Porter Randolph is sitting in her shoebox of an office in a Waltham, Mass., high rise, a full-length parka flung on a nearby chair. A February wind whistles outside, across a landscape of oyster grays and pewter blues. Behind Randolph hangs a wall-sized map, resplendent as a tapestry, of the island of Dominica, where pepper sauce is about to come out of a processing plant and into colorful bottles marked with the name Oualie, which translates, roughly, as beautiful waters -- and someday soon, Randolph hopes, as flowing cash.

At the core of Oualie (pronounced oo-walley) Ltd.'s metamorphosis from beachbound vision to up-and-running business lies a story whose title could be "Educating Octavia." Here is a woman for whom the past two years have amounted to a crash course in the art of starting up. In that time, she has made hundreds of cold calls, hung out in grocery stores to watch how merchandise moves, and tapped the talents of people who know more about the food business than she does. She has studied everything from the economy of the Caribbean Basin to the placement of bar codes on soft-drink labels. It is the sum of this effort that has brought Octavia Randolph this far, allowed her to move at least from a sunstruck epiphany on the beach to a cramped office overlooking a snow-swept parking lot.

Oualie has created an initial line of six Caribbean-inspired specialty and snack items, some of which will hit retailers' shelves this September. Each is packaged in vivid, attractive colors. The line includes: a low-sugar carbonated juice made from papaya and passion fruit; two conserves, one made with mango and lime, the other with passion fruit and papaya; chips, cut extra thick, made from fried bananas, not potatoes; a salsa based on fruit, not tomatoes; and a pepper sauce made from Scotch Bonnet peppers, which are native to the Caribbean Basin.

Randolph's intent is to make high-quality snack items and everyday prepared foods. She is not selling another can of chili powder that sits in your kitchen cabinet for as long as you own your house. She claims she is making foods that add accent to daily life, round the clock, through the seasons. You can drink Oualie sparkling fruit juice at breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The chips you can eat anytime, anywhere. They go well, by design, with Oualie salsa. "This is food you rip open the bag and eat," Randolph says. "Retailers love that kind of product."

The U.S. market for gourmet and specialty foods reached $10 billion in 1986 and is expected to grow to $14 billion by 1990. The natural-soda market currently exceeds $100 million and is growing at 4% a year. But Octavia Randolph knew little of this in January 1987 when she returned from Nevis, determined to start a company and change her life.

Her first day of work Randolph called on the Boston chapter of SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), the FDA, USDA, and U.S. Customs. She began studying the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a government program that encouraged U.S. investment in the islands. She subscribed to trade journals to learn how specialty foods were bought, sold, packaged, and processed. She knew where she wanted her line to end up: in high-end specialty food stores in the Boston area. She would start local and build a following, "customer by customer." Randolph made the rounds, noting what was on the shelf and how it looked. She asked a lot of questions and got some free advice. "People in the food business like to talk about food" -- a good thing, since Randolph had budgeted zero for market research.

That figure matched her first-year outlay for advertising; packaging, not promo spots, would be crucial. "The food business is a marketing business," she says. "The packaging is so emotional. It's the only statement a little company like Oualie can make to the potential purchaser." In April 1987, after interviewing four design firms, Randolph chose Clifford Selbert Design Inc., in Cambridge, Mass.

"We hit it off," recalls Clifford Selbert. "She was willing to give us a lot of freedom as well as some clear direction. That's rare in a client."

Randolph found the first design too understated. It looked like a wine label -- too much white space. Selbert rejoined that the colors she wanted were too dark, too brooding. You didn't want people picking up jars of jam and thinking of voodoo. They agreed to punch up the colors, make them hotter. Several months later they had a bright, eye-catching label -- something a curious customer would at least pick up.

Although Randolph felt confident about her design sense, she was egoless enough to know that she needed a lot of help when it came to running a business. In May 1987 she recruited Oualie's only other full-time employee, Deborah Pepin, 31, through a referral resulting from a cold call. Pepin, Oualie's vice-president of sales and distribution, came from the largest specialty-food importer in the United States, where she had been a sales representative. She brought with her contacts from the more than 200 accounts she serviced and knowledge gained from a decade in the industry.