Business prides itself on 100 percent Shreveport
Kathy and Lauren Ross are the mother and daughter business team praising Shreveport-Bossier City landmarks through their T-shirt company Sweet Tee.
The T-shirts feature places and sayings ingrained into the Shreveport-Bossier City lexicon. Sweet Tee has three styles at this point – “Welcome to ShreVegas,” which highlights the casino industry; “Thrill Hill” that features a ’50s style car with a couple inside, hands thrown in the air enjoying the ride down the famous hill; and “Betty Virginia Park,” which highlights an image of the iconic rocket that residents used to enjoy but is now no longer in the park. They have plans to create more designs in the future.
“We have some great designs coming up, and we love that people tell us what they think would make a great shirt,” Lauren said.
Sweet Tee worked with Todd Miller and Paul McCallister, of Popular Creative in Shreveport, to get the designs perfected.
“We designed them, sketched out and told them what we wanted. It was a joint thing, but we had final creative say as to what came out,” Lauren said. The shirts are printed locally at LAMB Speciality Advertising, and they use American Apparel T-shirts. “[Artist] Robert Trudeau gave us such a compliment when he said we were making ‘gourmet T-shirts,’” Lauren said.
Kathy and Lauren have worked together multiple times as event planners and philanthropists, and Lauren is also one of the founders of the Academy of Children’s Theatre, but Sweet Tee is an idea they have been working on together for three years now.
“It’s opened up this wonderful conversation,” Kathy said. “Strangers will walk up to me when I have my shirt, and they see the design. Their eyes light up, and they say, ‘Oh, I remember I had my first kiss in junior high at the top of the rocket,’ or ‘I remember driving my Mustang down Thrill Hill.’ It’s just opened up this great, positive conversation about our community. I think that’s what Lauren and I really want – to talk about the positive things here instead of the doom and gloom.”
The “positives” have included some with people who have great connections to the designs of their Sweet Tees.
“We had a girl contact us who bought a shirt, and her grandfather was the one who bought the rocket during the Space Age of the ’60s and donated it to the city of Shreveport for Betty Virginia Park,” Lauren said. “It’s exactly what we were going for – that connection to the past that we sometimes forget about.”
Lauren and Kathy are excited about the buzz surrounding their shirts. They officially opened for business May 7, and things just took off.
“In three weeks, our Facebook page got to 500 likes,” Kathy said. “We were stunned!” They are now nearing Month 2 of business and have almost 1,000 likes on the social media site.
The three styles of Sweet Tees come in both men’s and women’s sizes from small to extra large. The Betty Virginia and Thrill Hill shirts are $28, and the Welcome to ShreVegas style is $32. Lauren suggests buying a size up as the American Apparel shirts tend to run slim. You can see the designs at their Facebook page www.facebook.com/pages/Sweet- Tee-Shreveport and can place an order by emailing them at sweetteesport@gmail.com. They will also sell the shirts at the South Highland Summer Market on Aug. 1 and 8 at Mall St. Vincent. For email orders, Kathy and Lauren deliver the shirts personally, which in addition to being a nice touch, also allows them to hear the stories from their customers they have grown to love. “We love working together and hearing all of the positive things people have to say. It’s grown so fast, and we love seeing who is buying our shirts. We just want to make a positive difference in the community,” Kathy said.
–Mandy Byrd
