Lalin Michael Jinasena made a name for himself with Casa Colombo. When the space was first opened to the public, it was the talk of the town, and subsequently won multiple awards for its interior décor and design ethic. He took over his father’s inheritance in the Jinasena Group, one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most diversified conglomerates at the time, and formed LMJ Holdings in 2006, branching cautiously but surely into more creative ventures in hospitality, design and food. Then, in late 2009, came the problem child.
From his experience in the retail and hospitality industries, Jinasena knew there was a need to bring brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants online. He also knew that for each of these small businesses to take ecommerce giants on singlehandedly was not a viable business plan.
“Having a Facebook page or an app is really not the same thing,” Jinasena points out.
A Facebook page needs constant attention, and for small businesses to invest in mobile apps and updated online inventory systems is no easy or rational task. Elephanti was the solution.
Elephanti was a mobile app that would allow retailers and restaurants to create accounts and add their inventory on to, which would then be visible to potential customers. Front end users (their clients) looking for a particular retail or food item could simply search the app and find what they wanted through recommendations. The app brought users a one-stop shop for figuring out which store or restaurant had what products, eradicating the need to walk from place to place checking menus and store shelves. To retailers and restaurants, it offered the possibility of competing with ecommerce vendors, by putting their products online on a single platform.
“I recognised the lack of a platform dedicated to both shoppers and merchants, where people can find and interact with their favourite stores and brands without cluttering their social spaces,” he explains.
Development began in Sri Lanka in 2010, and the app was launched with fanfare in the US in 2012. Jinasena chose to launch Elephanti in the US for the simple reason that his market was clearly not in Sri Lanka, and his intention was to be a global business.
[pullquote]A Facebook page needs constant attention, and for small businesses to invest in mobile apps and updated online inventory systems is no easy or rational task. Elephanti was the solution.[/pullquote]
Jinasena’s holding company, LMJ Holdings reportedly invested $4.5 million (a number not confirmed by Jinasena for reasons unknown) in seed funding in Elephanti, but the venture didn’t last long.
The proposition seemed to be a win-win, and Jinasena says he was “surprised” to realise that retailers were resistant to get onboard, not just with Elephanti, but technology in general.
“The problem was that retailers, the ones who will be using the technology, were not so tech savvy or quick to adapt,” Jinasena explains. “They knew the problems they faced, but most of them were not ready to deal with it.”
Jinasena admits that more market research might have helped the team behind Elephanti come to this understanding sooner and strategise accordingly. But with the backing of its parent company, Elephanti had the luxury of indulging in a little adamant perseverance.
“It’s good to say you need to do a lot of research,” he says, “But sometimes you get bogged down in the numbers so you never go ahead and do something, you constantly see the negatives.”
After seeing no pick up in interest, Jinasena finally decided that he had given it a good enough shot, no regrets. If nothing else, he had avoided the “what if…”
“You have to know when you have a reached a point when you have given it your all – financially and emotionally – and you have to disengage,” he says. “If it’s not going to work, then you have to stop.”
Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, a start-up incubator in California, USA, claims that the biggest reason some start-ups work and some fail is timing. Jinasena feels the Elephanti offering is still very relevant and the problem it proposed to address still exists, but the market isn’t ready. He firmly advocates for doing the things one believes in, but he does not mistake passion for success.
“If it works, that’s great, if it doesn’t, it’s a learning experience,” is how he sums up the Elephanti story, with a shrug.
LMJ Holdings’ portfolio is highly diversified, ranging from aluminium manufacturing and export to hospitality, fast food and design, but IT is not an area the conglomerate had got into until Elephanti. “IT is something everyone wants to get into in some context,” Jinasena explains the decision.
But precisely because IT is now everybody’s business, it is absolutely necessary that one’s product stands out among the crowd. Jinasena, being a designer at heart, had close control of the creative side of Elephanti’s development. But his know-how of the technical aspects of mobile app development is limited. He applauds entrepreneurs who step into the murky waters of a business they don’t quite have experience in, and learn the ropes on the job, but he cautions against it.
“It’s good to get into other areas [of business], but you have to have a certain amount of technical knowledge,” he points out, “unless you have somebody you trust who can make that informed input to every move. You have to consciously evaluate yourself and see if there is something in the fundamentals that you need to change.”
Jinasena took a chance on an idea with Elephanti. The results were not what he hoped or expected, but he makes sure the learning pushes him forward.
“When one door closes, many others open,” he says. “So you get up and you keep going.”
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alin Jinasena claims – and the LMJ portfolio might attest – his inheritance does not constrain him to traditional business. Having lived and worked extensively in the global business and IT hubs of Singapore, London and California, he understands the need to contextualise business opportunities and recognise aspects in the macro environment that affect what an organisation is doing.“You need to broaden your horizon to see how things are really going to work.”
With Elephanti, far from being overwhelmed by the IT boom, Jinasena was in fact ready to embrace the technology and social media changes that were takingplac e across the globe at the time.
Jinasena’s legacy began with C. Jinasena, who from a bicycle and sewing machine repair shop, grew a machinery repair business servicing the big industries (coconut and rubber) of the early 1900s. Half a century later, C. Jinasena and Co, under the leadership of the original Jinasena’s son T. S. Jinasena, branched out to the production of water pumps, which the company is still most well known for.
T. S. Jinasena had four sons who were brought into the business by the late 1960s as Jinasena Group diversified further into hospitality, garments, exports, rubber and a host of other businesses. By the new millennium, at a century old, Jinasena Group was one of the most diversified conglomerates in Sri Lanka.
[pullquote]You have to know when you have a reached a point when you have given it your all – financially and emotionally – and you have to disengage. If it’s not going to work, then you have to stop -Lalin Jinasena[/pullquote]
In 2009, assets under the Jinasena Group banner were divided between the four brothers. The oldest, Tissaweera Nihal Jinasena, brought his share of three businesses under LMJ Group, of which he was Chairman and appointed his son, Lalin Michael Jinasena,chief executive. LMJ had already created a distinct brand identity for itself in the boutique hotels market with Casa Colombo. Deer Park Hotel in Girithale and The Royal Lotus Hotel in Polonnaruwa, which were part of the Jinasena inheritance, didn’t fit with this identity, and were sold. The third business, aluminium exports manufacturer Alumeco, remains a part of the LMJ portfolio, wholly controlled by Lalin Jinasena since the demise of his father in 2015.
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fter Elephanti, Jinasena came back to what he knew and loved best.Chief executive of Lalin Design, Jinasena’s first landmark design project was Casa Colombo, which made waves and won multiple awards for its unique design concept. He has since engaged in multiple design projects at his own boutique hotels (Casa Mirissa and the new Juce Hotel in Ambalangoda) and consultations for others’. As of 2015, he engages local and overseas clients in building, interior and furniture design projects through Lalin Design.
“Lalin Design is my escape,” he reveals.
The company’s business lends itself well to all the other businesses under the LMJ banner, Jinasena says. Being able to handle the design and creative aspects from creative logos to graphic design for all LMJ businesses including aluminium, hospitality and fast food internally is something he values.
Jinasena’s latest venture is closer to home. SPACE, the contemporary furniture store on Dharmapala Mawatha, is a new direction for LMJ, but something that draws from the company’s roots in manufacturing and design.
“It’s very difficult in Sri Lanka to find outstanding [furniture] pieces that are affordable,” he explains the thinking behind SPACE.
This market gap, combined with the boom in housing in and around Colombo, provides SPACE the ideal niche to grow a design-led furniture business. Jinasena’s focus with SPACE is contemporary furniture at affordable prices.
Products on offer at SPACE are imported from China, Indonesia and Singapore, allowing the business to keep healthy margins and yet price them “affordably”.
“Some people do bring down modern furniture,” Jinasena admits, pointing out nevertheless that “you find that it’s exorbitantly priced.”
Keeping true to the spirit of the designer, SPACE features arty and iconic pieces in unusual colours and shapes that Jinasena himself handpicks. He is going against the traditional furniture business model on a number of points.
First, the materials SPACE favours are not the traditionally popular but highly inconvenient solid mahogany and teak woods. Instead, they favour engineered wood, fibre glass and formed foam, which are lighter, more convenient and can be designed to modern tastes. Second, SPACE keeps stock.
“You see it, you buy it and you can take it away with you,” Jinasena explains. “It’s kind of like Ikea, but without the flat packing.” They will nevertheless undertake customizsed orders.
Jinasena pays considerable attention to SPACE, he says, because since launching in July 2016, it is still quite new. The business is already proving “quite good”, he says, but the venture is concerned with much more than profitability.
Furniture design has always been a passion with Jinasena, a fact easily demonstrated by the interiors at his landmark Casa Colombo, which consist mainly of items designed by him and produced specifically for the venue.
“People don’t want just a couple of chairs, they want everything,” Jinasena explains the imported furniture. “If I just have my own line of furniture, that’s limiting. I can’t have the kind of wide selection that makes it a viable furniture store.”
SPACE, Jinasena hopes, will get the ball rolling for him to later introduce his personal furniture brand, which he is currently working on.
This amalgamation of the traditional and modern is characteristic of how Jinasena approaches all his businesses.
Casa Colombo is a boutique hotel with 12 rooms, and the Mirissa property has a mere six. With the influx of more budget tourists than high spenders, small capacity and high-end intimacy – the game plan of Sri Lanka’s once-popular boutique hotels – is visibly becoming outdated. Large five-star hotels and home-run hostels are eating into the accommodation market from both ends of the stick.
“High competition is driving rates down,” Jinasena says. “Boutique hotels focus on service and need quite a bit of staff to run, so it’s difficult to compete.”
But this does not mean Jinasena finds himself unable to compete.
The latest hospitality venture under the LMJ banner is Juce Hotel in Ambalangoda, the first of what Jinasena plans will be a chain for middle-level spenders. Jinasena describes it as “funky, young” and “vibrant”, a marketing strategy that is clearly spelled out also in the hotel’s design ethic.
Jinasena Group, from the days of the original conglomerate, has remained highly diversified, and in the fourth generation, Lalin Jinasena continues the trend with the LMJ portfolio. But there is a strategy of solid business with a design and creativity focus to the many baskets of eggs.
“It’s about finding niches in the market, and figuring out what works,” Jinasena says. “I’m not going to say all I’m doing is hotels. Whatever piques my interest and whatever can penetrate the market and is able to make a difference, then yes.”