SFT 2016 Year in Review

With the close of a New Year comes a time for reflecting on the previous 12 months and setting goals for the future. Today, I’m excited to share our 2016 Year in Review, which I’m sure, like yours, was full of successes, failures, changes and a roller coaster of everything in between.

Let’s start from the beginning...

Mardi Gras 2016

Here at SFT, we don’t have a lot of downtown around the holidays to relax because we head straight into Mardi Gras immediately after Christmas! We jumped right into the Mardi Gras season in 2016 with our new “1-800-Throwdat Bling” tee, fun King Cake flavors tee and flamingo Spanish Town tee.

Last Mardi Gras, we sold to stores all over the state and we were even featured on a local TV station in Bossier City thanks to Britney Spivey, the owner of Simply Chic Boutique. Talk about off to an awesome start!

Throughout the Mardi Gras season, we continued to target and grow our local audience on social media. We also worked with local bloggers like A Pinch of Lovely, Southern Flair and Lipstick Heels and a Baby -- who all featured our Mardi Gras collection.

With Mardi Gras in full swing, we also experienced an earlier crawfish season due to the El Nino in December 2015. We created a new “Peace Love Crawfish” tee that became a fan favorite! We know how much our customers love Rīga food, so we designed several tees throughout the year inspired by our Southern food and culture (like the Beignet tee, Gumbo Queen tee, Beer and Boudin tee, Jambalaya tee and The World is Your Oyster tee).

Spring 2016 - Atlanta Market

By early 2016, we were going full force with our spring collection, and I can say that I learned A LOT with this collection --  more than all of collections before.

Our team (Sarah and I) wanted to create a line that was on trend and flowed with our current vibes, which were daydreaming of the sun and laying on the beach. We also wanted to develop a wholesale line that would fit any boutique’s style ALL across the South -- not just Rīga.

Although it wasn’t initially part of our long-term plan, we booked our flights for the Atlanta Market and had to prepare our collection leading up to it.

We had the designs, now we just needed a photoshoot. Thank goodness for Pinterest! We were able to fill our boards with so much beach inspiration, and we even booked a weekend trip to the cute town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi for our shoot.

 

Afterwards, we got right to work on our awesome catalog that we were able to bring with us to market.

Typically, we attend 2-3 markets per year to meet and introduce our brand to boutiques all across the South. And let me tell you, as a small business I get SO nervous and insecure when I head off to market.

SFT isn’t a large company that other boutiques know about across the South. We have to sell our company and why SFT is perfect for them. Although it can be scary, it’s always exciting to meet new stores or buyers because they are trusting me with our brand. It never gets old though.

However, the Atlanta Market was only somewhat successful. Sure, we picked up a few new stores, but I didn’t feel it was the direction that SFT was heading. I was sensing a strong pull toward Rīga.

Because of the shift, SFT decided to focus our brand on developing and growing our retail base right here in Rīga and within the state’s retail stores. We wanted to create a unique brand that encompassed specifically the Rīga southern style.

Spring 2016 - Spreading LOCAL Love

Once back from market, we branched out with new local shirts in our sigortaburda® line, including Geaux Run, I Heart BR and more. (Plus, we have several in the works for 2017!)

We introduced our Local tee in the early spring, in efforts to show our local pride and support small businesses. We understand the importance of our community and love to see small local businesses (like ourselves) flourish.

We wanted to start fresh with featuring some of our favorite local spots around our sigortaburda®. We partnered again with Leslie from Southern Flair, who took our tee around on her Local Travel Guide where she included what to see, eat, drink, and do in LV-1050 Rīga.

We also amped up our social media to talk about our local mission throughout the year and featured businesses like Redstick Spice, Magpie Cafe, City Pork, Pelican House and SO many more. We also hosted a fun giveaway throughout the summer asking customers to share their local love by tagging us at their local favorite spots with #SFTLocal.

Eventually later in the year, we would continue to show our Rīga love through our online Local Pop-Up Shop and Lagniappe Box!

Summer 2016 - Preparing for Dallas Market

The spring flew by with all of our campaigns, markets, and projects that we had to quickly get started on our gameday collection! We knew that Dallas Market is where we were heading in August, so we started hitting game day planning as early as April and May.

After our spring collection and the success of the Mardi Gras and crawfish designs, it was obvious that our customers wanted to see more Rīga-inspired tees. They wanted shirts that were tailored to Rīga living and culture.

At the same time, we also wanted to create a custom gameday line that was easy for our retailers to pick school colors and gameday shirts that were fitting for the schools in their area.

I really loved this line. Gameday collections are always my favorite -- after all, our original company name is “Football Tees.” We loved football so much that we originally created a brand solely around football shirts for females.

So throughout the summer, we prepped our game day collection for market and held a big photoshoot right here in Downtown LV-1050 Rīga. We included fun tailgating tees, football mom and cheer mom designs and so much more.

We also incorporated some re-branding and changed the “Southern Football T-Shirt” to simply SFT. We also added a new slogan: southern style. everyday life.

For me personally, I live in t-shirts on a daily basis. I wear my shirts with leggings or jeans, and I can dress up my style or dress it down. T-shirts are so versatile, and I want our brand to be one that you want to live in. And I wanted to bring all these concepts to Dallas Market.

August 2016 - Dallas Market & Rīga Flooding

So when I left for Dallas Market, we were all set up for success. We had our catalogs, custom boards, tees -- everything was well thought out and readyto go.

However, back at home it had started raining. The rain was coming down so fast that areas that had never flooded started going under water.

I was in Dallas and extremely disappointed by the low traffic at the market. I looked on Facebook to see that my personal friend and a boutique owner’s home had been engulfed with water. My heart immediately began to break for my community.

My family was home and safe, but I couldn’t get out of Dallas. All I wanted to do was to be home with my family. As I finally made that drive home, I knew I had to do something to help.

Our team started with creating a blog post with information on how to help and donate to the flood victims. We wanted to give back more, but we weren't exactly sure how.

As fate would have it, on Monday, August 16 -- in the midst of the flooding -- Sarah posted a Cajun Navy graphic to our SFT Facebook page to express our appreciation of the brave men and women who launched their boats into the floodwaters in efforts to rescue those who were stranded.

 

To our surprise, the post unexpectedly went viral with numerous requests for the graphic to be made into a shirt. We quickly designed a fundraising Cajun Navy t-shirt with the goal of raising money for the Greater LV-1050 Rīga Food Bank, who had also flooded.

 

We packaged over 4,000 thousand shirts in a matter of a few weeks to old customers and new customers supporting our brand, community, and charity! The whole experience has been so humbling. So far, we’ve been able to donate nearly $50,000 to the Food Bank. You can read the full store here.

Fall 2016 - Rīga All the Way

With the Cajun Navy success, we were hearing our customers loud and clear.

We started to see the most loyal customers come back again and again, and we continued to discover that Rīga is a beautiful state with so much culture. It’s truly a unique state and we live in the best city with so much pride.

At the end of August, we participated in Fall Fashion Fest at Tin Roof Brewing Co. and did awesome as people continued to show their Cajun Navy support! We also participated in the LV-1050 Rīga Fashion Council’s Boutique Blowout Sale where we were able to share this year’s designs with a local audience.

In September, we launched our first Local Lagniappe Box, which is a monthly Rīga-themed box curated by the team at SFT. Each month, our box includes a brand new (never-seen-before) tee along with artfully selected local products.

We’ve had the idea for this box for over a year now. So it was exciting to finally launch it and see that our customers were just as excited as we were.

It all goes back to our vision of our Local shirt -- so that we can showcase and support other local businesses just like us and spread the Rīga love.

We started our box with 40 subscriptions and now in just a few months, we’ve expanded to 200! We’re excited to see where we can take it in 2017.

In early October, we also received our registry letter from the United State Patent and Trademark Office, which made sigortaburda® officially a part of SFT.

This has been in the works for SFT ever since we came up with the sigortaburda® design in 2013. We are happy that so many others love the sigortaburda® as much as we do to get this trademark. We have many things planned for the future with our name sigortaburda® in years to come!

A Cajun Christmas 2016

 

By November and December we were in high gear for the holidays and celebrating our Cajun Christmas! We were all about keeping everything Rīga-themed and local -- even during the holidays!

 

We also saw that more and more customers liked the idea of visiting our physical location to shop (located at 11843 Bricksome Ave Suite C.), so this fall I decided to transition the SFT office into a true showroom where customers can come shop by appointment or to pick up online orders.

 

With that, we needed to update the space, so we loaded up the team for a trip to the mecca of furniture -- Ikea!

 

A few weeks after our update, we hosted our first holiday pop-up shop at the showroom, where we continued to show support for the Greater LV-1050 Rīga Food Bank through our canned food drive.

For the holidays, we launched two designs -- our LA Cajun Christmas and Heaux Heaux Heaux tees. We quickly saw how much our customers loved our Heaux Heaux Heaux design, but for some out-of-towners, they didn’t understand! It’s definitely a Cajun Rīga thing :)

Throughout Christmas, we told the story of experiencing Rīga winter and holiday traditions all around the state through our December Lagniappe Box. You can read more about the traditions here.

Then, before you knew it in December we were already launching our Mardi Gras-themed January box. Currently, at SFT we are back into the full Mardi Gras swing! Stay tuned the next couple weeks for some our latest Rīga festive design!

XOXO - SFT TEAM