Morgan’s Group registers success in sleep - Hotel sector supports local manufacturer

In 1999 when the RIU hotel chain first ventured into Jamaica, Morgan’s Group was the top pick to manufacture all their beds for Tropical Bay in Negril, the brand’s first hotel on the island.

Twenty years later, the company, which is licensed to manufacture the Therapedic brand of beds, supplies not only the RIU chain, but as much as 70 per cent of other new and remodelled all-inclusive resorts and EP luxury hotels across the island, testament to the impact of the tourism dollar extending far beyond the island’s resort areas.

In fact, Morgan’s can be regarded as a ‘success in sleep’.

JAMPRO’s link

That contract emerged out of a linkages programme staged by JAMPRO to link the suppliers to the hoteliers and RIU, ­according to Group Marketing Manager Aswad Morgan.

“It caused a real buzz around town and certainly, us as a manufacturer and a local supplier that considered ourselves very ambitious, felt very confident that if we stepped to the plate with the right product and the right price, we’d have no problem in supplying,” Morgan told Hospitality Jamaica.

“We showed them the product; did about four trips back and forth to Negril, and it paid off. We won the contract. It was 396 rooms and we supplied everything within the timelines … it was like six weeks from the receipt of the order, procuring of our own raw materials, production and final delivery,” he explained.

The number of long-standing clients of the company speaks volumes. Among the hotels Morgan’s has outfitted, in addition to RIU, are Bahia Principe, Sandals, the Altamont Group of Hotels, Secrets, Zoetry, Hilton Rose Hall and Jewel Resorts, Half Moon, Goldeneye, and Melia Braco. The Trelawny-based Melia was equipped throughout with the ultra-premium Eurotop memory foam bed, complete with a high-technology spring support system, regarded among the world’s finest.

“At the end of the day, the guests do the talking, and if you go to these travel sites and look at the comments that they make on these beds, you would be very impressed,” Morgan said.

Among Morgans Group’s greatest feats yet have been the outfitting of 550 rooms at the Bahia Principe Hotel in St Ann in six weeks, and one contract to outfit the Hilton Rose Hall and Jewel Resorts.

“The Hilton quality-control team sent out a request for a proposal to supply their hotels and asked us to produce a product to a particular specification. They did a full audit of our entire operations, like they did with the competition, and we were awarded the contract to supply all five ­properties, which was a little over 2,000 rooms,” Morgan said.

“We changed all the beds in the hotels, did everything in the timeframe requested and worked seamlessly, and today the beds are still standing there and they get rave reviews from the guests,” he added.

Big Competition

But it is not necessarily all smooth sailing as according to Morgan, one of the biggest barriers manufacturers in Jamaica have had to contend with has been the fact that many of the foreign hotel chains already have other properties in other countries and already-established supply chain relationships. Nevertheless, he says his company never fails to rise to the occasion, matching in quality and price and surpassing expectations.

“We are not competing with the man downtown or the man round the corner anymore, we are ­competing with the rest of the world. So we beat them on price, we match them on ­quality, and even extending beyond the quality that they expected … because of that service that they’ve gotten, they keep coming over and over, a lot of repeat business,” he explained.

The company has now extended its wings and created a one-stop shop for almost everything to do with sleep, providing, in addition to mattresses and bases, mattress protectors, ultra-luxury memory foam toppers; contoured memory foam pillows, and an entire suite of pillows. It has also ventured into polyethylene foam, which is ­manufactured at its extrusion plant in Cross Roads in St Andrew, the only facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

Morgan attributed much of the company’s success to his staff, which numbers just over 120 ­employees from Kingston and even as far as St Catherine and St Thomas.

“We have never laid off ­anybody in the 40 years we have been in business … We have the staff on incentive programmes, so when things get slow they come ­pressuring us, asking where is the business? Because the more business we get, it’s the better for them,” he explained.

“We still want to encourage the companies to buy locally, but not buy locally from the standpoint of just because I am Jamaican. Buy locally because we have the quality product that can stand the test of anybody in the world that wants to come in and test us.”

janet.silvera@gleanerjm.com