David Gilmour, a Canadian-born entrepreneur who within the Nineties constructed a luxurious resort on Wakaya, a tiny island he owned in Fiji, then created Fiji Pure Artesian Water, turning a neighborhood 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, mentioned David Roth, a good friend and enterprise associate.
By the point he purchased Wakaya from two enterprise 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 inns within the South Pacific, which made him aware of the archipelago nation of Fiji, and he co-founded a gold-mining firm.
However there was one thing totally different about Wakaya. On the time, he was mourning the demise of his solely youngster, Erin Gilmour, who had been murdered in her house in Toronto in 1983.
He known as the island “the final bastion of sanity on the earth,” his spouse, Jillian (Sweeney) Gilmour, mentioned in a telephone interview. “He thought when every thing went kerflooey, that is the place he would go. The island itself is so lovely. There’s an space known as Chieftain’s Leap, with hovering cliffs, the place peregrine falcons make their nests.”
In 1990, he opened the Wakaya Membership & Spa, a cluster of eight free-standing suites on a former coconut plantation. On the time, he mentioned, he opened it as “actually only a place the place my associates, these I can’t put up in my own residence, can come and share the peace.” He added, “I don’t see it as terribly business, frankly. It’ll in all probability solely break even.”
It nonetheless turned well-liked with celebrities, together with Tom Cruise, Invoice 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 harm.
Sooner or later within the Nineties, Mr. Gilmour noticed company on the property consuming bottled Evian.
“He mentioned, ‘There’s one thing unsuitable with this image,’ and I mentioned, “What do you imply?’” Ms. Gilmour mentioned. “And he mentioned, ‘We’re on our personal island, and so they’re consuming water from Lake Geneva. I do know that with Fiji’s rainfall, there have to be a better water supply.’”
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 around the globe.
Mr. Gilmour mentioned the water’s purity was the results of Fiji’s geographic remoteness. “There’s no acid rain, no industrial air pollution, no pesticides,” he instructed The Palm Seaside Put up in 1998. “It’s the purest virgin ecosystem.”
Fiji is now the second-largest imported water model in the US, based on the Beverage Advertising and marketing Company.
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 enterprise administration for a 12 months on the College of Toronto after which accepted his father’s provide of a $10-a-day stipend to journey by Europe, which he did for some time earlier than returning to Canada.
“I realized what individuals are actually like,” he instructed Palm Seaside Illustrated in 2015. “I realized to the touch solely what I completely imagine in 100%. And I realized learn how to care for myself.”
He turned down his father’s provide to affix his financial institution and as an alternative moved to Montreal to promote pots and pans door to door for a 12 months.
His first enterprise was importing fashionable, 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 corporate made critically acclaimed, refined hi-fi programs whose patrons included Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner. Nevertheless it foundered after branching into televisions and shifting operations, disastrously, to Nova Scotia.
Amid steep losses, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk have been pressured out of the corporate in 1968 and later settled a lawsuit claiming that they offered shares earlier than the announcement of poor quarterly leads to 1967.
They recovered rapidly, beginning Southern Pacific Properties in 1969, which collected greater than 50 inns in Australia, New Zealand in addition to in Fiji, New Caledonia, Tahiti and different islands. An formidable growth that was to be constructed close to the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, was ultimately 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.
Within the early Eighties, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk have been among the many authentic companions in Barrick Gold, one of many world’s largest gold producers. Mr. Munk was its longtime chairman and chief government, 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’m extra the entrepreneurial sort who likes challenges of beginning up, and Peter loves rising a colossus,” he mentioned. “As soon as it reaches a crucial mass, I form of get bored sitting round a boardroom desk.”
Fiji water, marketed as a luxurious model, was a serious business success however, like different manufacturers, drew scorn from environmentalists, who criticized the trade for the vitality consumed and greenhouse gases created in making and delivery plastic bottles, and for the plastic waste they depart behind. Fiji, particularly, was singled out for delivery water to customers 1000’s of miles away.
Mr. Gilmour offered Fiji Water to Roll Worldwide in 2004, and Wakaya to Clare Bronfman, an inheritor to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, in 2016, after a Class 5 cyclone devastated the island. “We offered it for 10 cents on the greenback,” Ms. Gilmour mentioned. 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 led to divorce.
Mr. Gilmour, who offered his Palm Seaside property final 12 months 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 perception that natural, single-source, very pure, high-quality ginger and turmeric could be one thing that individuals wished,” Mr. Roth, who began the corporate with Mr. Gilmour, mentioned by telephone. “And Oprah selected it twice as one in all her favourite issues.”
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