New concept creates a Shreveport brand

Books have been written about the power of positive thinking. Seminars have been taught about it. Now, local entrepreneurs and advocates are getting behind renewed efforts to boost Shreveport, Bossier City and the region to highlight what makes this part of the world positively special.

Pete and Tara John have taken the approach of rebranding that idea of positive thinking for the area. At the same time, mother and daughter Kathy and Lauren Ross are creating wearable icons of the region’s historic importance to residents. Meanwhile, the Downtown Development Authority has created what it calls #cooldowntown.

In mid-November Pete and Tara John launched Shreveportant, a concept they hope to see adopted as the brand of Shreveport. “Shreveport doesn’t have a lifestyle brand. Most cities don’t,” John said. “I get excited when I start talking about it. It’s hard in an elevator spiel to tell someone what Shreveportant is.” John hopes to drive people interested in this area to the Shreveportant Web site to get more information and an understanding about the idea behind the brand.

“[It’s] simply a positive and proud lifestyle brand that is intended to create positivity and a sense of pride about the community in which we live,” he said.

The Web site has several components, John explained. The first is the retail component where visitors can purchase items like T-shirts, tote bags and keychains. “People buy the merchandise, and it creates conversation about Shreveport, whether someone is living locally or someone’s living abroad. A girl called us from Knoxville and said, ‘I was wearing the shirt, and three people came up and said, I’ve been to Shreveport.’” The second component is called Shreveportraits. John described it as a showcase for people that are “doing cool things in the community.” Currently, the portraits include the people who have helped build the brand. That portion of the Web site will become a library of these profiles. John stressed the section is not biographical; rather, it is people sharing what they love about this area.

A third component is a blog still in the development stage. John said the goal is to find content that is totally positive. “Everything positive, everything that’s going on in the community. We want to talk about the present and what’s so great about these different things.”

John is also developing Forever Shreveportant, which would showcase locations and architecture that are emblematic of this area. “Those are critical things in the community that we feel should be showcased because they’re still doing great stuff. If for some reason we ever lost it, it would be terrible for the city.”

All this positivity is actually John’s side line. He is quick to admit that this project is not how he and his wife pay their bills. “This was strictly developed because I want Shreveport to be this positive place. I want people to want to stay here when they graduate school. I want people to move back here when they go off to school.”

John acknowledged that there are other positive outlook movements out there, but explained that Shreveportant is “hyper-local.” He said they hope that the brand could not only be a tagline for the city, but also instill a movement where people begin with the good, not just about the bad, of the community.

“Our thought is that if we can instill this movement where people are talking about the positive and talking about the progressiveness of the city, then we think people will see more of that. Ultimately, Shreveport can become a place that people want to come to,” he said.

John said his hope is that when tourists come to the area, they would go to shreveportant.com to discover more about the city and some of the great things going on in the community. “While they’re here, they might decide to go to King Hardware or the Agora Borealis, where we sell our shirts and our other products,” John said. “Maybe they choose to pick something up as a cool thing they got when they were in Shreveport.”

The ultimate goal, he explained, is to create a lifestyle brand that is positive about the area.

“Support the local stuff that’s going on because there’s a ton of great stuff going on. But you have to experience it,” John stated.

According to their Web site, Sweet Tee Shreveport is the result of numerous conversations between mother and daughter Kathy and Lauren Ross. They were seeking a way to design nostalgic fashion that was totally Shreveport.

“We enjoy travelling and going to New Orleans and other parts of the country and know that the one thing you can always bring home to remember a city is a T-shirt,” Lauren Ross said. “T-shirts are really in style right now, so we thought Shreveport-Bossier has a lot of great landmarks and nostalgic things that maybe people had forgotten about. So we decided to honor Shreveport-Bossier. Our tagline is ‘Wear Your History.’” They currently have about 13 designs available that celebrate Shreveport and Bossier and even a couple for Natchitoches. Ross said they try to introduce a new design every few months, and they have a significant backlog of ideas that should keep them busy.

Among those already on the market are shirts celebrating Betty Virginia Park’s once-iconic rocket ship, Thrill Hill, the Holiday Bowling Lanes, even Cross Lake. That shirt boasts a uniform design reading, “LA Cross Lakers” and the numeral 26. Ross said the number refers to 1926, the year the water source was dammed to provide the water supply for the city of Shreveport.

The Sweet Tee Shreveport effort is totally local, Ross explained. All the design and printing are locally sourced; even the sales tags and signage are locally produced. “That’s our theme: to keep it local, support local and celebrate local.”

But their clientele is not just clustered around I-20. “We also ship lots of T-shirts to former Shreveporters. We ship them all over the country,” Ross said. They are also regulars at the Makers’ Fair downtown and are hoping to move into the 624 Texas Street building early next year. “We won’t have a retail space, but a kind of pick-up/drop-off point, a little studio. Then, we’ll do pop-ups down there – we’re hoping once a month or so – to feature new things,” Ross said.

The Downtown Development Authority originally designed a campaign called “Downtown is cool because …” The idea, according to Executive Director Liz Swaine, was to think about the things that make Shreveport’s core unique and special.

“The thing that is surprising, even for those of us who work downtown every day and think about downtown every day, and market downtown every day, is how many neat things there are in downtown when you stop and think about it,” Swaine explained. “And our goal was to get people to stop and think about it.”

During a more than eightmonth period this year, the DDA encouraged people to take photographs of themselves in “cool” places downtown and share them on social media. Swaine said the response was very encouraging. She said the Authority judges the effort a success because of the reaction.

“You get your proof from attitudes; how people are talking about something. The fact that people are taking ownership of downtown more now than they ever have. They talk about it in positive terms. They talk about things they want to see. They talk about the future with downtown in it. We will continue pushing the whole cool downtown thought and concept, encouraging people to realize what they have here and how very neat it is,” Swaine said.

“It’s not just about selling T-shirts is what I want everybody to understand,” Pete John added. “You have to sell a ton of T-shirts to make money. It’s more about the lifestyle and creating this positive culture. I’m the managing partner of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. We’re all about giving back to the community. That’s what we do. [Shreveportant] was created because I’ve been bred to believe in giving back to the community that gives so much to you.”

– Joe Todaro