Live With Passion.
I have said those words for years.
Long before Kreyol Passion became a company, they described the way I wanted to live my life.
I started exploring the kitchen when I was six years old.
I grew up in the 1990s, and my family did not have much. We were poor. I did not really understand what that meant at six or seven years old. I just knew what I saw.
I watched my mother work job after job while barely speaking English. Whatever had to be done to keep our family going, she did it.
There was no speech about perseverance. No lesson written on a wall.
I watched her live it.
By the time I was eight, I was already trying to make money of my own. I walked dogs. I mowed lawns. I washed cars. If there was something a kid could reasonably do and someone was willing to pay me for it, I was probably interested.
A few years later, I became fascinated with computers.
We did not have people around us teaching me technology or business. I learned because I wanted to know. I kept pulling things apart, figuring things out and trying things until I understood more than I did the day before.
That curiosity eventually became an obsession with technology, then business, and eventually with the process of taking something that exists only in your head and making it real.
I have spent a lot of my life doing exactly that.
And I have failed at it more times than I have succeeded.
I don't say that for effect.
Some ideas went nowhere. Some decisions were wrong. Sometimes I did not know enough. Sometimes I did not have the money, the resources or the right people around me. There were times I believed in something deeply and still could not make it work.
Failure has a way of removing the romance from ambition.
It teaches you very quickly that believing in an idea does not make you entitled to its success.
You still have to learn.
You still have to listen.
You still have to execute.
And sometimes you have to admit that somebody else knows something you don't.
That last lesson has probably changed me more than anything.
For a long time, I thought building something meant having all the answers.
I don't believe that anymore.
I don’t know everything, and I’m comfortable saying that. No one sees the whole picture from one point of view. That is where collaboration becomes important. Sometimes someone else sees what I can’t, and the value is in bringing those perspectives together and being willing to listen.
I want people around me who are exceptional at what they do. People who will tell me when I am wrong. People who can see things I cannot see. People whose experience, knowledge and ability make the idea better than anything I could have built alone.
That is how I am building Kreyol Passion.
And that matters to me because this company is deeply personal.
What began as something I made in a kitchen has survived years of changes, mistakes, learning, rebuilding and moments when walking away would have been easier.
There were years when Kreyol Passion was nowhere near ready for retail.
We kept working.
There were things about food science, manufacturing, commercialization, operations and retail that I simply did not know.
So I learned what I could and found people who knew the things I didn't.
There were versions that had to change.
We changed them.
There were assumptions that turned out to be wrong.
We let them go.
That is what “Live With Passion” has come to mean to me.
It is not blindly chasing something because you love it.
It is caring enough about what you are building to confront what is wrong with it.
It is being willing to fail without becoming comfortable with failure.
It is learning what nobody taught you.
It is creating an opportunity when one is not waiting for you.
It is knowing when to stand your ground and when to listen.
And it is continuing to show up when the outcome is not guaranteed.
I know what it feels like to want more for your life than what is immediately in front of you.
I know what it feels like to start without much.
I know what it feels like to believe in something before there is much evidence that anybody else should.
Kreyol Passion carries a lot of that history with it.
Today, there is a real product. There is a team around it. There is a path to retail. And there are people sitting at the table with knowledge and experience I did not have when this began.
That means more to me than simply being able to say I started a company.
We are building something properly.
And after everything it took to get here, I would rather take the harder road and build it right than rush something onto a shelf just to say we made it.
That is the standard I want attached to this name.
That is what I mean when I say:
Live With Passion.
JACQUES ABSOLU
Founder, Kreyol Passion
