How Shaka King Built Three Careers
By| Antonio Dey | HGP Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — Before Shaka King was running a logistics company in Guyana, she was selling real estate in New York. Before that, she was building a fashion brand. The journey from one to the next — across industries, continents, and career definitions — is the story she tells without hesitation, and it begins, she says, with family.
“My mother being in trade, my stepmom being a customs broker, and my father — he was actually in logistics and trucking,” King said in an exclusive interview with HGP Nightly News.
King is the Chief Executive Officer of King’s Logistics, a Guyanese logistics company she has built alongside a team that includes family members and professional staff. Her path to the industry was neither direct nor conventional — which, she suggests, is precisely what makes it work.
From New York Real Estate to Guyanese Fashion
King’s first career was in property. After entering adulthood, she worked as a real estate agent in New York — an experience that, she says, gave her a foundational business education she would draw on across everything that followed.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that I actually come from a real estate background. My very first job was actually as a New York real estate agent,” she said.
From real estate, she pivoted to fashion. She studied business management for the fashion industry, with a focus on economics, at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The academic grounding was valuable — but not always directly applicable.
“Many of the principles taught were not applicable to Guyana’s unique market conditions,” she observed.
She adapted what she could, leveraged what she knew, and created Pieces and Things — a fashion brand she describes as the product of blending business discipline with creative instinct.
The Government Contract That Changed Direction
The transition from fashion to logistics was not planned so much as recognised. King says that an opportunity to secure a government contract — to procure items for the Ministry of Education — opened a door that ultimately proved more financially viable than building a consumer fashion brand in the Guyanese market.
“It was much easier money than it was getting up on camera and selling to the girls for me,” King said, reflecting on the shift from fashion retail to procurement.
That contract became the foundation for a broader logistics operation — one that has grown to include her nieces, the support of her brother from the construction industry, and a professional team she credits as central to the company’s development.
The Philosophy: A to A.1
A former student of Bishop’s High School in Georgetown, King now offers advice to young Guyanese building businesses — and her philosophy reflects the incremental, adaptive approach that has defined her own career.
“You need to use every single thing that you have to make it,” she said. “And maybe not from point A to Z, but I always say point A to A.1.”
The distinction matters to her: not the leap from beginning to end, but the discipline of moving one step forward from wherever you currently are — using the resources, relationships, and knowledge available rather than waiting for ideal conditions that may not arrive.
It is a philosophy shaped, she says, by a family that has always been in business — and by years of learning, across industries and countries, what it actually takes to build something that lasts.
