Richard Coles
Haitian Industrialist, Entrepreneur & Founder of Nexus Haïti 2055
Richard Coles has spent three decades building and leading enterprises in manufacturing, maritime logistics, and consumer goods in Haiti.
Born in 1965, Coles studied at the Lycée Français Alexandre Dumas in Haiti before training as an architect in Paris, graduating from the École Spéciale d’Architecture in 1991. He returned to Haiti in 1994 to join the family enterprise and founded Multi Assembly, an apparel operation that grew into a group of manufacturing companies.
Through Multi Wear, Multi Knits, National Cutters, and Olitex, his companies produced for North American brands and retailers, including Hanes, Walmart, JCPenney, Gildan, and Fruit of the Loom, exporting millions of garments a week and employing more than 7,000 people at their peak.
Elected the youngest-ever president of the Association des Industries d’Haïti (ADIH) in 2002, Coles worked to strengthen the foundations of Haitian industry. He helped open negotiations with the United States Congress that led to the HOPE Act—the trade-preference legislation, later extended through HOPE II and the HELP Act, that granted eligible Haitian apparel duty-free access to the U.S. market and remains central to the country's export economy.
During his tenure, ADIH also secured customs facilitation for its members, brought WRAP certification to Haiti in partnership with the International Labour Organization, and installed customs and Ministry of Commerce offices inside the SONAPI industrial park.
With his brother Philippe and the Coles Group, he built the logistics and transportation division of the CIMEX group, bringing global shipping lines to Haiti through Seaboard Marine of Haiti and MSC Haiti. He also developed operations across Transco, Maritime Logistics of Haiti (MLH), and Caribbean Port Services (CPS), bringing shipping, inland transport, and port handling under one platform.
Today, through Groupe Coles, his business interests span consumer goods, including Tropic S.A.
In 2010, alongside a small group of fellow businessmen, Coles founded the Forum Économique et Social, which brought together many of the private sector's institutions and the country's main local groups behind a shared objective: building a Haitian private sector that is more transparent, more self-critical, and committed to operating under clear and consistent rules.
In 2025, he created Nexus Haïti 2055, conceived as the guardian of a national vision designed to outlast political cycles. In collaboration with Institut Macaya, another private-sector institution, he is working to advance that vision through 2055, with its first fifteen years designed with support from Attali et Associés.
Across all his endeavors runs one central conviction: Haiti suffers less from a shortage of ideas than from the absence of a unified voice to carry them forward—a private sector that speaks as one, and Haitians at home and across the diaspora working together toward a shared national vision.