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OUR STORY
Some stories start with a bicycle.
Others start with the sea.
Ours start with both.
OLD HARBOUR BAY · 1966
On the morning of March 1, 1966, a fishing boat overturned off Old Harbour Bay, St. Catherine. Richard Bartley, sixty-three, and his son (Proffy), were lost. His daughter, Tresilda, grew up in that same fishing town — raised by a community that had already learned what the sea could take, and kept fishing anyway.
Thirty-one years later, the national newspaper ran a different kind of story about her.
JAN 5, 1997
Ride on, Tresilda Coley.
The headline read: “Ride on, Dresilda Coley.” They misspelled her name — it was Tresilda — but everyone who loved her simply called her 'Deeda'.
Deeda rode her bicycle loaded with goods across Jamaica with a whistle around her neck so neighbors knew she was coming. When the load got too heavy, she attached a small carriage to carry more. She rode as far as Portland Cottage from Old Harbour — nearly eighty miles — and had been doing it since before her children were born.
“Is a van I want. I am never satisfied when I come off the road.”
Asked when she'd retire the bicycle, she was almost offended. She wasn't asking to stop — she was already planning how to go further.
THREE GENERATIONS
The bicycle never stopped. It just got bigger.
Deeda raised her three daughters and a son near the water that had taken her own father — and later, raised one of her granddaughters too. She passed something down to all of them: a refusal to wait for the world to make room for you.
Decades later, one of her daughters — the same age Deeda was on that bicycle — suddenly faced job insecurity after working since she was nineteen. She turned to her own hands, the way her mother had shown her. Today she runs Tresi's Eats, cooking escovietch fish, steam fish, festival, and bammy sourced from the same waters where her mother was raised.
Deeda's granddaughter — raised in that same fishing community during her formative years — grew up, married into a Turkish family, and found herself at the meeting point of two traditions that spoke the same language: hospitality. The Turkish hammam. The Jamaican table. Both are the same act — making someone feel cared for the moment they arrive.
That's Tresi's Essence — Turkish linens, bath towels, and hammam spa essentials, brought to Jamaica's hotels, villas, and the people building beautiful spaces on this island.
TRESI'S TODAY
Different products. The same hands.
WELCOME TO OUR TABLE
Whatever brought you here — a hotel room that needed something better, a dinner that needed something real, or a story that simply caught you — we're glad you came.
Deeda never stopped riding.
Her bicycle just got bigger.
TRESI'S ESSENCE · TRESI'S EATS
Old Harbour Bay, Jamaica · Turkey · Wherever the road leads next
