David Gilmour, a Canadian-born entrepreneur who within the Nineteen Nineties constructed a luxurious resort on Wakaya, a tiny island he owned in Fiji, then created Fiji Natural Artesian Water, turning an area useful resource into a number one bottled model, died on June 11 at his house in Manhattan. He was 91.
The trigger was cardiac arrest, stated David Roth, a buddy and business associate.
By the time he purchased Wakaya from two business companions in 1987, Mr. Gilmour had constructed a number of companies over 30 years. He imported Scandinavian house furnishings and constructed high-end stereos. He helped assemble a sequence of lodges within the South Pacific, which made him conversant in the archipelago nation of Fiji, and he co-founded a gold-mining firm.
But there was one thing totally different about Wakaya. At the time, he was mourning the demise of his solely youngster, Erin Gilmour, who had been murdered in her residence in Toronto in 1983.
He known as the island “the last bastion of sanity in the world,” his spouse, Jillian (Sweeney) Gilmour, stated in a telephone interview. “He thought when everything went kerflooey, this is where he would go. The island itself is so beautiful. There’s an area called Chieftain’s Leap, with soaring cliffs, where peregrine falcons make their nests.”
In 1990, he opened the Wakaya Club & Spa, a cluster of eight free-standing suites on a former coconut plantation. At the time, he stated, he opened it as “really just a place where my friends, those I can’t put up in my own home, can come and share the peace.” He added, “I don’t see it as terribly commercial, frankly. It will probably only break even.”
It nonetheless grew to become well-liked with celebrities, together with Tom Cruise, Bill and Melinda Gates (who spent a part of their honeymoon there) and Keith Richards, who fell out of a palm tree there in 2006 and was flown to a hospital in New Zealand with a head damage.
One day within the Nineteen Nineties, Mr. Gilmour noticed company on the property consuming bottled Evian.
“He said, ‘There’s something wrong with this picture,’ and I said, “What do you mean?’” Ms. Gilmour stated. “And he said, ‘We’re on our own island, and they’re drinking water from Lake Geneva. I know that with Fiji’s rainfall, there must be a greater water source.’”
Mr. Gilmour realized of an underground aquifer beneath the volcanic highlands of the Fijian island of Viti Levu with water wealthy within the mineral silica. In 1996, his firm started packaging and delivery its distinctive sq. bottles world wide.
Mr. Gilmour stated the water’s purity was the results of Fiji’s geographic remoteness. “There’s no acid rain, no industrial pollution, no pesticides,” he instructed The Palm Beach Post in 1998. “It’s the purest virgin ecosystem.”
Fiji is now the second-largest imported water model within the United States, in line with the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
David Harrison Gilmour was born on Nov. 5, 1931, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and grew up in Toronto. His father, Adam Gilmour, was an funding banker, and his mom, Doris Godson Gilmour, was an opera singer.
Mr. Gilmour studied business administration for a yr on the University of Toronto after which accepted his father’s supply of a $10-a-day stipend to journey by Europe, which he did for some time earlier than returning to Canada.
“I learned what people are really like,” he instructed Palm Beach Illustrated in 2015. “I learned to touch only what I totally believe in 100 percent. And I learned how to take care of myself.”
He turned down his father’s supply to hitch his financial institution and as a substitute moved to Montreal to promote pots and pans door to door for a yr.
His first business was importing trendy, streamlined Scandinavian housewares and furnishings. He adopted that in 1958 with the start-up Clairtone Sound, a collaboration with Peter Munk, a Hungarian-born electrical engineer. The firm made critically acclaimed, refined hi-fi programs whose consumers included Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner. But it foundered after branching into televisions and shifting operations, disastrously, to Nova Scotia.
Amid steep losses, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk have been compelled out of the corporate in 1968 and later settled a lawsuit claiming that they offered shares earlier than the announcement of poor quarterly ends in 1967.
They recovered rapidly, beginning Southern Pacific Properties in 1969, which accrued greater than 50 lodges in Australia, New Zealand in addition to in Fiji, New Caledonia, Tahiti and different islands. An formidable improvement that was to be constructed close to the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, was finally nixed by President Anwar Sadat in 1978.
Three years later, Tan Sri Khoo Teck Puat, a Singaporean banker, bought Southern Pacific for a reported $130 million, however Wakaya remained individually owned by Mr. Gilmour and his companions, till Mr. Gilmour purchased them out.
In the early Eighties, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk have been among the many unique companions in Barrick Gold, one of many world’s largest gold producers. Mr. Munk was its longtime chairman and chief govt, and Mr. Gilmour was a board member till 2001. Mr. Munk died in 2018.
Mr. Gilmour described his working relationship with Mr. Munk in 2008 with The Globe and Mail of Toronto. “I am more the entrepreneurial type who likes challenges of starting up, and Peter loves growing a colossus,” he stated. “Once it reaches a critical mass, I kind of get bored sitting around a boardroom table.”
Fiji water, marketed as a luxurious model, was a serious industrial success however, like different manufacturers, drew scorn from environmentalists, who criticized the business for the vitality consumed and greenhouse gases created in making and delivery plastic bottles, and for the plastic waste they go away behind. Fiji, specifically, was singled out for delivery water to customers hundreds of miles away.
Mr. Gilmour offered Fiji Water to Roll International in 2004, and Wakaya to Clare Bronfman, an inheritor to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, in 2016, after a Category 5 cyclone devastated the island. “We sold it for 10 cents on the dollar,” Ms. Gilmour stated. In 2020, Ms. Bronfman was sentenced to jail for her function in enabling the Nxivm intercourse cult.
Mr. Gilmour is survived by his spouse. His marriages to Anna Wilmot, Erin’s mom, and to Diane Williams resulted in divorce.
Mr. Gilmour, who offered his Palm Beach property final yr for $44.9 million, had one final firm in his portfolio at his demise: Wakaya Perfection, a wellness firm that sells powders and capsules of ginger and turmeric grown in volcanic soil in Fiji and Nicaragua.
“David had this belief that organic, single-source, very pure, high-quality ginger and turmeric would be something that people wanted,” Mr. Roth, who began the corporate with Mr. Gilmour, stated by telephone. “And Oprah chose it twice as one of her favorite things.”
Source: www.nytimes.com