18°20′N 64°55′W · ST. THOMAS, USVI
The only research firm that lives where you do business.
Territory-native market research for USVI businesses, healthcare, hospitality, and government. Real answers from your actual community — not a mainland firm’s best guess.
THE PROBLEM
USVI businesses have had three options. All of them bad.
Every week, businesses in this territory make real decisions — pricing, new services, expansion, a second location — on gut feel. Not because research doesn’t matter, but because it’s never been built for here.
The territory runs on community trust, word-of-mouth, and relationships. A firm that doesn’t live inside that can survey all it wants; it won’t hear the truth. We built 18° North so USVI businesses could finally get research that does.
- Fly in a mainland firmMainland prices, a hotel-room read of the market, and a report that could have been written about anywhere.
- Use generic Caribbean dataRegional averages tell you nothing about an 87,000-person territory with its own economy and its own rules.
- Skip research entirelyThe default. And the reason so many good businesses guess wrong on things a two-week study would have caught.
RESEARCH PACKAGES
Priced so you can say yes without a board meeting.
Four fixed-scope studies, each delivered in about two weeks as a plain-language report you can act on Monday morning. No 90-slide decks. No jargon. No scope creep.
SOUNDING № 1
Customer Pulse
$1,500
What do your customers actually think? Satisfaction, loyalty drivers, and the one thing to fix first — from the people already walking through your door.
DELIVERED IN ~2 WEEKS
SOUNDING № 2
Price Check
$2,000
Are you leaving money on the table — or pricing people out? Willingness-to-pay research on your core offerings, so your next price change is a decision, not a gamble.
DELIVERED IN ~2 WEEKS
SOUNDING № 3
Launch Test
$2,500
Will the new thing land? Concept validation for a new service, menu, product, or location — before you spend real money building it.
DELIVERED IN ~2 WEEKS
SOUNDING № 4
Mystery Experience Audit
$3,500
What is it actually like to be your customer? A structured, scored evaluation of the full experience — booking to walk-out — with findings your team can fix this month.
DELIVERED IN ~3 WEEKS
Need something bigger? We also run custom studies and institutional research — patient experience programs, brand perception, visitor behavior, focus groups, and community needs assessments for government and grant-funded organizations. Start a conversation.
True Bearing™
In navigation, a true bearing is your real direction after correcting for what pulls the compass off. Same idea here. Your instincts say one thing, your customers experience another — True Bearing is a full turnaround engagement that finds out where you actually are, charts where you’re going, and fixes the heading. Research, training, and an action plan in one program.
Mystery shop visits, customer research, and staff interviews. We see the business the way your customers experience it — and put the findings in plain language.
The data becomes a plan: what to fix first, what it should cost, and what “better” will look like in numbers you can check.
Customer service training built from your own data — not a binder — plus a follow-up measurement so you know the correction held.
WHY LOCAL MATTERS
In a territory where everyone knows everyone, honest answers are earned.
A mainland firm buys respondents from a panel. We recruit them from a community we’re part of — which means people talk to us the way they actually talk, not the way they talk to a stranger with a clipboard.
- Recruitment through real networksChurch communities, business associations, and fifteen years of working relationships across St. Thomas — access no off-island firm can buy.
- Reports in plain languageWritten for the owner who has to act on them, not the consultant who wants to look smart.
- Research plus executionThrough our sister brand, findings can go straight into strategy and campaigns. Insight that sits in a drawer is a wasted study.
OUR CONFIDENTIALITY STANDARD
Small community, high stakes. Every study runs under a codified data-ethics standard: respondents are anonymous, findings are reported in aggregate only, and no client ever sees who said what. People only tell the truth to a firm they trust not to expose them — that trust is the product, and we protect it accordingly.
THE FOUNDER
Fifteen years of insights work. One zip code that matters.
KATIE WILSON · FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL RESEARCHER
18° North was founded by Katie Wilson, a marketing strategist with more than fifteen years in consumer insights and brand strategy — including national market research and insights firms — who now serves the territory’s business community full time.
- BACKGROUNDMarket research and consumer insights at national firms, with B2B and B2C clients across wellness, healthcare, and lifestyle categories.
- TERRITORYActive operator in the USVI business community, with client work spanning healthcare, hospitality, and food service on St. Thomas.
- APPROACHAI-accelerated research operations — modern tooling that delivers agency-grade rigor at prices a local business can actually pay.
GET STARTED
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
Every engagement starts with a free 20-minute discovery call. Bring the question keeping you up at night — we’ll tell you honestly whether research can answer it, and what it would cost.
Prefer email? Reach us at hello@18northresearch.com. We respond within one business day.
18°20′N 64°55′W · ST. THOMAS, U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS
18° North Research
Research from here.
18°20′N 64°55′W
St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
A division of BlackKat Digital Solutions
© 2026 BlackKat Digital Solutions LLC, d/b/a 18 North Research. All rights reserved.