The Bottom-Up Revolution
When a tragic car crash forced street safety changes in Chattanooga, Tennessee, local businesses panicked about losing customers. But they soon discovered that foot traffic beats car traffic every time.
Emily Thompson, entrepreneur, author, and marketing chair of the North Shore Merchant Collective, explains how she helped push for increasing walkability and reclaiming space for people — and how those efforts made surrounding businesses far more successful.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. I'm delighted to be here bringing you another conversation. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, wherever you are.
Today, I'm really excited because we're going to have a chance to hear more about what it can look like to advocate for a strong town as a business owner. This is something that personally I'm always very interested in hearing about because I think that small businesses are critical to the flourishing and productivity of our towns. We're joined today by Emily Thompson. She is a longtime entrepreneur. She currently runs Almanac Supply Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small shop where she aspires to help customers connect with nature through home goods like candles, crystals, and even jewelry and books.
Outside of running the shop, she's also part of a business collective that works to promote goals to help the district be more productive, many of which center on making the area more walkable. So this will be very much in alignment with the Strong Towns goal. One of our campaigns is Safe and Productive Streets. So I think we'll have a great conversation about that, and Emily's really going to be able to bring us a frontline perspective. Emily, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm looking forward to talking with you.
Thank you so much, Tiffany. It is an absolute pleasure to be here.
So I love running the show because I get to talk to people from all over the country who live in all kinds of places. I grew up moving a lot, traveling frequently. I currently live in Waco, but it's always fun to see if I'm going to have someone on the show from a town that I've spent some time in, and I have spent time in Chattanooga. So this is really exciting. How did you come to call Chattanooga home? Can you tell us a little bit about that story and also what you love about it?
Absolutely. I love Chattanooga. I've been here for 10 years at this point, but I've traveled here off and on since I was a kid. So I grew up visiting here. When I was in grade school, we would come here to the aquarium or to Rock City with my family. It's funny—after we moved here, we started doing some hikes on one of the mountains, and I kept having these weird flashback moments of, "I feel like I've been here." I remember calling my mom once, and she was like, "Yes, we've hiked all over those mountains." We did that as a kid, so young that I barely even remember it, but I was able to form some very early memories. So I grew up visiting here a whole lot.
I spent a lot of time here when my partner was in grad school, so this was a halfway point between where we were living and where we grew up. We had a friend who lived here, and we would stop here midway and spend a night or two almost every time we traveled to and from, especially for holidays. We loved it so much that whenever my partner was graduating grad school, we decided that we wanted to live here, but the timing wasn't quite right. So we ended up actually moving back to our hometown. We lived there for about two years, and I came to visit here one time with a friend of mine about two and a half years after moving home. I remember calling my partner and being like, "Do you remember how we were going to move to Chattanooga? Why didn't we do that?" I actually even remember exactly where I was in the conversation I was having when I made that life-changing call, and he was like, "Let's do it." So we bought a house here six months later.
So tell me about the town from your perspective. I only spent a little bit of time there. I was doing a research project, so I always love to hear what people enjoy about the towns where they live and what stands out to them. What do you think makes Chattanooga a unique and interesting place?
It's beautiful. I think I said that a moment ago when I mentioned Chattanooga. It's just a really beautiful place. It's funny—when we decided, whenever I made that phone call and asked him if we were going to move to Chattanooga or not, there was about a six-month period. We decided a couple weeks after deciding that we were going to move here that we actually wanted to travel the country. So we were taking the opportunity of packing up and moving as an opportunity to actually pack up and hit the road. We were gone for about a month and a half, 40 days. We call it our biblical adventure. We packed up everything, put it into storage, sold a lot of stuff, put our little family in our car, and drove around the country for 40 days.
We took that even as an opportunity to think we could stop anywhere, we could find the place that we want to be. We drove north to Indiana, we drove through—we headed west through North Dakota and Montana and down through California. We hit so many places on this road trip. We got back, and we're like, "No, it is Chattanooga. That is where we are supposed to land." It's just beautiful. The people here—I'm from the South, so the South as a whole is home to me. So the people here have that really great southern charm that I really enjoy. There's some really interesting history here that I think gives it an interesting flavor that I can't find in a lot of places, and it has a great food scene, which is really important to me.
The economy here is really interesting. I would say one of the most difficult things about it is something that, as a business owner especially, I'm consistently butting my head up against. But it's cool, and really it's just gorgeous. I was driving my partner to work this morning and driving across the Tennessee River with these mountain views and these beautiful bridges, and I was just thinking, "I'm so lucky that I get to look at this every day." I was just thinking about that this morning on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, whatever day it is. It's just beautiful.
I live in Waco and moved here from Brooklyn, New York. I remember when I first got here, I struggled. I mean, that's not true—I struggled greatly. It actually took me a while to figure out why, and I finally boiled it down to beauty. I'm not saying Brooklyn is the most beautiful place to live. It's beautiful in a different kind of way. Just realizing, "Oh, I have different values. I draw energy from the place I'm in in different ways," whether it's the walkability and just the drama and the adventure of living in a city or if it's the natural beauty or the aesthetic. So I completely understand what you mean.
I lived in Asheville for a little bit. I don't know if you ever spent any time there, and I remember in the fall, almost having—not literally—almost having car accidents, but just realizing I really have to pay attention when I drive because the foliage there gets so radiant and just so beautiful. I think beauty is so important, especially when we're thinking about our cities and how people connect to the places that they're in. So I would love to talk about a different aspect of your journey. You've been an entrepreneur for a long time. Can you share about that background of yours? Share a little bit about your professional background?
Absolutely. I'm going to try to make this quick because you weren't lying when you said longtime entrepreneur. But I think this is really important for defining the point of view that I bring into so much that I do, because it's so different from most people, especially that are my age. So here we go.
I bought my first tanning salon, my first business, which was a tanning salon, at the age of 18, which was a couple decades ago. It was kind of a wild thing that really planted a seed. I sold it about two years after I bought it. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot and thinking, "I will do business forever. This is going to end up being a core part of me." So I owned a business very early, and it was a brick-and-mortar business, which I think is really important. It was in a time before Facebook pages for businesses and social media and all of these things. So I was owning a brick-and-mortar store in a time where very few—where almost no one who's starting business in the past 10 years or ever again—will exist in business in that way, which I think gives me a really interesting perspective into what I do now.
But I ended up selling that business so that I could finish college. While I was in college, though, I discovered Etsy, and this was the glory days of Etsy. If you remember Etsy in the mid-aughts, it was a beautiful place of community and making and all of those things. So I discovered Etsy at that point. I started a business, a handmade jewelry business, while I was finishing up school, and I ended up growing it into doing local craft fairs and markets. I ended up building my own website, which are some skills that I picked up whenever I was in high school. So I got into online business accidentally in a really beautiful area. But even then, again, before social media was a part of how people did business, this was very early online business world.
I ended up with my own website and learning how to market that website, and ended up having Etsy friends who were asking me to build websites for them. So I accidentally started a branding and web design agency, which was a ton of fun. Or it wasn't an agency—accidentally I started doing it accidentally, and then intentionally ended up building a branding and website agency that I ended up running for 10 years. At the peak of production, I employed 15 people. We were doing brands and websites for really cool interior designers and makers and artists and brick-and-mortar stores as well. I was in my hometown in particular trying to talk all of the brick-and-mortar stores into getting on the internet in the mid-2010s, which was a ton of fun and very difficult to do, but really advantageous for those who did it. So I ended up doing that work for about 10 years.
In the middle of doing that work, content marketing for online businesses became a thing, and that led me to launch a podcast. So I was a podcaster for about eight years. I launched the Being Boss podcast in 2015. At the time that we launched it, it was the time in podcasting when people were really just listening to Serial. Everyone can remember that little moment in the podcast past—such a moment. So we launched Being Boss at that point. Launched it with a friend of mine, a co-conspirator, if you will, to start a show talking to creative entrepreneurs. We ended up being on the top charts of business for many years, the highest-ranking female-led business podcast for several years. We ended up growing a very vibrant and amazing community. We did events. We hosted non-conference, quote-unquote, vacations across the country. We did speaking gigs. We published a book in 2018.
So I spent several years really building up this reputation and this repertoire in helping creative entrepreneurs on another level start and grow their businesses. I would say that's where I definitely cut my teeth the most in business ownership because I was not only running my own businesses—because always two—but I was also working with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people to workshop business problems, to guide them through clarifying their ideas, and at the same time really forming my voice and point of view and the way it was that I wanted to run business.
Which led me to the next thing. In 2018, whenever we launched the Being Boss book, I ended up shutting down my web design agency, and I started what was and is my dream business, which is Almanac Supply Co. So I'd spent all of these years working with all of these creatives to launch their businesses. I wanted to do mine, and that was in the form of Almanac. So we started online. We got our first storefront in the summer of 2021, and we moved into our current storefront in the spring of 2022. That led me to 2023, closing down the podcasting so that I could focus on Almanac. Now I'm a shopkeeper and an owner-operator of a retail business that works both online and has a storefront.
What an inspiring story. This is a dangerous podcast to host because every time I get off the episode with someone, I'm like, "Hmm, I just feel so inspired. Oh, maybe I should try that." I come from an entrepreneurial background myself, so it's really neat to hear that journey. So I think it's interesting that you started brick-and-mortar, and then you had this foray into the online world, and now you're back to brick-and-mortar. I'm just curious what that's been like for you. What would you say has been the most challenging part of kind of coming full circle from starting brick-and-mortar to coming back to brick-and-mortar as you've been watching the business landscape change in response to the internet, and especially with the rise of e-commerce? How have you been navigating all of that?
Sure. That's a great question. I think having already done brick-and-mortar, and at such a young age, doing brick-and-mortar again, the barrier to entry was significantly lower. I think if you're used to doing business online and not paying rent or having to warehouse or just all of the systems and processes that go into running a brick-and-mortar store, if you've never experienced it, that's a big load to lift, I think. But because I had already been there, I was ready to do it. So I do think having been there made it easier for me to go there again. Because I was in brick-and-mortar, and then I transitioned to online only, and then brought them together into what it is that I'm doing now, it has both made everything easier because I look at my brick-and-mortar friends who have never done online—they don't know how to grow an email list, they don't know how to market on Pinterest, they're unsure what to do with their Instagram. I definitely have multiple advantages because I have done both, and I'm bringing them together now.
So I started in brick-and-mortar, and also well before e-commerce and well before social media, and now I just get to hang out in the middle and bring both of those things together. I'd say my biggest takeaways are that, number one, it's incredibly gratifying, I think, to be able to bring all of that experience into one thing that I'm doing. I'm able to see how things fit together. I'm able to implement on multiple levels and able to just grow and see the world in a really interesting way that people who haven't had both of those experiences don't really get the opportunity to see and do.
I will say, moving from online only into the physical world again is probably the most gratifying thing. It is so nice to just be able to give someone a candle, see their face when they get it, them give me money, and then they walk away and the transaction is over, more or less. I think that real-world exchange of value and, again, being in the same physical place with people is something that I missed—I wouldn't even say very quickly. I definitely grew to miss that as I was sitting here pushing buttons on my computer, and that's what led me to want to go back to that space. So it's really gratifying.
I think if you are only brick-and-mortar or you're only in e-commerce, you are in some level limiting your revenue generation, especially if you are only in brick-and-mortar. So being able to bring that e-commerce and online marketing side into it, I think, is really powerful. I do think of algorithms differently. So people always talk about Instagram algorithms changing and how that ruins your business. Try having a brick-and-mortar store and having your road shut down for a week. That's also an algorithm change, and one where, whereas my brick-and-mortar neighbors think that's the end of the world, because I've grown up in a world where algorithms change every three to six months, it's easier for me to accept and adjust and make alternative plans. So it's given me a really interesting perspective of the world in that way.
I think one of the most important things that I've learned—and I knew this, now I just have to feel it every day—is when you are running a retail store and you are running an e-commerce existence, you are effectively running two businesses. You have the same products, but you talk to your customers differently, you market differently, your daily to-do list is different. I have online days and I have store days. Those days are incredibly different, and I have to split my time between the two of them in whatever season we're in because it is effectively running two businesses, as opposed to just having an online part of this.
Yeah, it's not like one business, two locations. So tell us a little bit about your shop and how did you decide the type of shop you wanted to open, the products that you sell? And then I'd love to talk a little bit about merging the small business world and the urbanism world a little bit. We're going to talk about foot traffic and how walkability and everything plays into this. But I would love just to give you a chance to share a little bit about what you sell and why do you love it, and maybe a little bit of the story.
Sure, thank you. So my degree was in geography. I was always the kid who ran around the woods. I played in the ditch in the backyard as a kid. Very much so love nature, love the outdoors. Even thinking about why I love Chattanooga, the nature here is beautiful. I'm very connected to that natural world, which maybe even is why I ended up escaping the e-commerce world in the way that I did. So that's very much so a part of me. My degree is in geography.
When it came time for me to really think about what kind of business I wanted to run, there was a part of me that was like, "I don't want to be podcasting forever." That was not a path that I really saw for myself. I used to measure success by how many days a month I could work but not be sitting at my computer. That was just something that was very innate to how it was that I just read my life. So when it came time to think about what sort of dream business I wanted to run, I wanted to get back to retail. I wanted to get back to brick-and-mortar, and I wanted to be very nature-focused.
So candles, for me, was something that I had been making for years, and I'm also very much so a maker at heart. I wanted us to produce our own candles here in Chattanooga and develop a line of candles, and I wanted it to be rocks. So we do sell a lot of crystals, and there's a lot of interesting preconceptions about crystal shop owners. I am not the usual one. I love a spreadsheet as much as I love clear quartz, but that was the world that I wanted to play in. Buying rocks for me is a ton of fun. We also sell a lot of jewelry, and so it is very much so a reflection of me and the things that I'm interested in. But I'm also very much so a business person. So it was this realization that if I'm going to run a business, what are the things that I want to be selling, what are the things that I love, and that's how I ended up curating Almanac. It's a ton of fun. I love doing it. The opportunity to go buy jewelry or go buy rocks or sell a candle, whatever it may be, there's never really a sloggy day, which I think is the biggest win of all.
So I'm sure that one of the biggest challenges that business owners face in the brick-and-mortar world is attracting foot traffic. Because I think of how do people make decisions to go buy a candle or to go buy a rock? Do people wake up like, "This is the day I'm going to go buy a rock?" I feel like a good portion of people's consumption is spontaneous, right? Something they see, it's a beautiful storefront, and they walk in. They're like, "Oh, wow. I didn't know I needed this candle, but here I am."
Except I do have to say, here in Waco, I do have a candle person. She has an amazing candle, and I—she sells them, prices them by the burn hour, which I think is really interesting, but just really great scents. I'm currently in the age of many diaper changes, so I've just discovered that a candle is basically essential for our house. When it gets out, I run to the farmers market and I find my candle person, and we have to sometimes talk about the schedule she's on. She's like, "Well, the one you like is still curing, so you're going to have to wait another week." I'm like, "Okay, I'll come back." So it's just a fun fact of my life having a candle person. I was never that. It's just fun.
Okay, so besides those of us who have dedicated candle people and we have our schedule down for when they're going to have our scent, can you talk about what it's like building a brand in a world where—I would say I feel like the way people navigate through their built environment, through their city, unless it's a really dense city and they're getting around on foot primarily—it is harder to find those shops because everyone's getting around in a car, and there's just less spontaneity for shopping, I feel like, when you're in a car. So can you talk about any strategies you found, or just your reflections on this issue of actually getting people into your shop who maybe haven't been planning to come in there and to learn more about your business and perhaps buy something?
Yeah, for sure. This is something that I think about all the time. Again, you want to think about a different set of algorithms that I have to—and any brick-and-mortar store has to consider. Number one is always going to be real estate. Where are you located? For me, I knew exactly where I wanted to be. Funnily, I totally manifested the space that I'm in. It was the single space in Chattanooga that I wanted the most for years, even before Almanac even existed. I knew that I wanted the space for something at some point in my future. So I ended up in that space, which I'm very grateful for. I wanted that space for a number of reasons. One is cute. I love it. It's a really cute space.
Important. What else? You said it was cute. Moving on, right?
But it's also in a really important area. So it is in the North Shore neighborhood of Chattanooga. It's on Fraser Avenue, which, if you're familiar with the area, you probably know where Fraser is, and it is the strip of indie shops in Chattanooga. So there's a couple of places that you can go to do your shopping. You can go out to Hamilton Place, which is where the mall is, for example, and the Fresh Market, where all the big box stores are. Or you can go to the indie shops in North Shore. So you can go to Fraser Avenue, and you can walk up and down the street, and you can pop into all the gift shops and grab some ice cream and go to the coffee shop and grab a cocktail or a snack, whatever it may be. It's the place that you're going to spend an afternoon.
I wanted to be there because, sure, I can get people to come buy rocks, but not very many. But people are going to come get cocktails at the restaurant next door, or they're going to come to the gift shop that's been down the street and is known for having the most hysterical greeting cards. That's where they're going to come because they've been there for 20 years. So for me, it was putting myself in the middle of a place that already had foot traffic that was aligned with what it is that I was doing and selling. So choosing the right real estate was number one, and I was able to get the exact spot that I have wanted for years.
But once I got into the store, you realize that you could do more, or you probably should do more. If you want more, you're going to have to do more. So some opportunities ended up coming up, and I made opportunities also for myself. I think most of it is really in the area of events. It takes a lot these days to get people off their phone or off their computer or off whatever it is that they're doing and out into the world, probably harder these days than it has many times in the past, though I think we've all experienced times where it was harder.
And I would even say getting people out of their car.
Yeah, for sure. So I had to think about that. How do you get people out and about? I ended up stumbling on this idea, thanks to a neighbor friend of mine, that people want things to do, and it's not just coming to shop. That isn't good enough. They want to come experience something. The shopping has to be an experience. So we've started doing a lot of events. I do events in store. There's events in our neighborhood. I often joke, and it's not a joke, that I've actually just become an event planner. That's what I'm doing a lot. We're doing one, two, three, four events every single month because you have to give people an additional reason to come to you, and we're finding that it's working.
Another thing that I ended up discovering a couple of years ago was, again, it can be difficult—it's easy enough for me to get people to come see me and buy a candle or a rock or whatever it may be, but it would be easier to get people to come to our neighborhood because there's multiple things to market. So the limited number of people want crystals or candles, but when I can get people to come shop vintage or get a cocktail or check out the stationery store, then they're going to experience the whole neighborhood, including me. Which led me into working with our neighborhood collective as the marketing chair to help market my neighborhood because those efforts are always going to benefit me too in some way. So it was really spreading that net.
Yeah, really taking a collaborative approach and thinking of the whole neighborhood rather than just your one shop. I think it's interesting that you talk about events because I feel like at the core of that is the desire for community, the desire to be together with other people. Because I think even shopping—yeah, shopping for shopping's sake has a short lifespan, I think. But when you're giving people an opportunity to be around their fellow citizens or fellow neighbors, or just to be around other people, I think that adds a level of meaning that I think is going to become even more valuable as people—I think people will burn out on the screen-based life. Hopefully we do, and I think the opportunities to connect in person will be there to meet those deeper needs.
So you mentioned the collective. Can you share a little bit more about that and how you all are working not only to tackle your marketing and business goals, but also just how you're able to take that energy and think about maybe some aspects of the built environment, or just the relationship between the way that the street is functioning and the vitality of the businesses on those streets, and how you're able to host those events and bring people out? Because I do think there's a connection between the way the built environment is designed and the way things are arranged, and how we're able to achieve these other goals. So maybe you can speak to that a little bit.
Yeah, for sure. So there is a collective—or that's what we call it—the North Shore Merchant Collective, that is a group of business owners in my neighborhood. So there's a defined geographic area that started about 20 years ago. If you ask around, they joke that it was a glorified book club when it started, but no one was reading books. They were just getting together to talk and mostly gripe, if rumor is true, and I've experienced enough that I think that's probably true, about the things that were happening. But really they were just talking about the issues in the neighborhood and getting together to discuss things and see what they could do about it.
They did launch a really great marketing initiative about 11 years ago, which I'm really grateful for. It's really cute, a holiday window treasure hunt, which involves the entire neighborhood. It's a lot of fun. We're doing our 11th year now. So this group started at that point just to stay connected. Over the past couple of years, it's really started doing some cool things.
So when I moved into my area, I went to a few meetings, and I didn't really think it was my vibe, so I kind of stopped going for a while. But then I did feel like if I was going to make Almanac really work the way I wanted it to, I wasn't going to be marketing Almanac. I needed to get people to our neighborhood. So I realized that getting more involved was how I was going to really make my geographic location work for me, and I wanted to also use my involvement with the group to leverage my ability to do larger events. One of the first things that I wanted to do as we were moving onto the street is I really wanted to shut down our street and do a market.
In that area, I feel like some places it's like, "Oh, we do that every spring or whatever." This is not something that was done in our neighborhood, but it's something that I really wanted to do. If I went as Emily, owner of Almanac, the crystal shop owner girl, I probably wasn't going to get quite the response that I wanted and needed in order to do these things. But if I went as a chair of this collective that's been in the community for 20 years and has connections throughout the city, then I could probably have the leverage to do more of what it is that I wanted.
So I got much more involved, as well as I had a friend of mine—which now is a friend of mine, but a woman—move on to my block who's a like-minded business owner. She has that really great millennial point of view of just being a little bit louder and doing what she wants to do in the face of some older neighbors and just going out there and doing it, which made it also easier for me to get more involved. So I have joined the collective officially as the marketing chair. So I'm running the social media. I'm doing the ads. She heads up the events, and together, the two of us are doing a lot of really fun things as a part of the collective and really for our neighborhood and our very small section of the neighborhood in particular.
So we were able to shut down the street this past fall for the first Fraser Festival, which we want to do twice a year. Even through doing that—so it probably took us about a year of pushing buttons, both computer buttons and people buttons, in order to make Fraser Festival happen. It ended up being a wild success. All of the vendors on the street had such a great day that most of them signed up for the second one without knowing when the date was immediately because it was one of the best events they had ever done. Multiple stores up and down the street had their best days ever, including mine, including the restaurant next door to me, and even some outside of the footprint of the event also had elevated revenue for those days. For me, that was a final, "Okay, this is exactly how we should be doing this." So it's using the power of that community to get things done either faster or better or just period in a way that I probably couldn't do if it was just myself. So it has been really powerful to do that.
How have you all been able to—because I know achieving some of those goals requires coordinating and collaborating with city elected officials or city staffers—how have you been able to facilitate conversation with them to achieve some of these goals?
Sure. I think the way we do this, I think, is the secret sauce that I really wish I could see organizations like this, or even just business owners period across all metropolitans, do because I've seen the power of it, and I've seen how difficult it can be in places where this doesn't happen. So at some point in the relatively recent past, I would say within the last five years, an initiative has started between our collective and, if I'm not mistaken, it was directly with the city councilwoman to start what is called City Action Meetings. These happen once every other month, and it is a meeting of collective officials, so me, being the marketing chair, I'm there, and just three or four others of us, and the city councilwoman is in the room and city staffers. So there's a representative from transportation, from parking.
Right now we are experiencing in our neighborhood—one of the large walking bridges that connects directly to our street has been under construction for about six to eight months now and will continue to be for the next 10 months. So there's a person who is involved with that reconstruction who is in those meetings to give us updates. Those meetings happen. They're about an hour long. Everyone's in the room, and we're able to address everything that needs to be fixed or adjusted or just addressed in general.
Some things that I've seen happen: A dumpster solution for a group of businesses was just put into place in a way that these businesses had existed in this space for decades with two trash cans out back for 10 businesses, which was wild and trash everywhere, but now there's a dumpster in place that we've worked on. Beautification projects recently—there was one for street planters. We were able to secure funding. We were even in one of those meetings, and someone goes, "The problem we're having is that we don't know how to water them. We need some sort of cart." And some guy from Public Works was like, "Oh, I have a cart. You can just have it." So, end of day that day, we had a watering cart that was going to allow us to water these planters.
And then also just keeping up to date with the refurbishment of the Walnut Street Bridge. So it's a place where we're able to get fast action, fast answers with the decision makers and the doers who do things. I was in a meeting recently, and someone was like, "There's some stray traffic cones or traffic barrels up on this intersection. They've been there for three weeks. They're not moving. Not sure what they are." "Oh, I think that's left over from something. I'll get them after the meeting." And after the meeting, he's running up to the corner, getting them, pulling them back to his truck, and they were gone within 10, 15 minutes of that meeting being over. So just having this one hour every other month—so not a ton of time—to meet and just get both small and giant things addressed. Sometimes that dumpster project took 18 months, which feels wild, but there were just that many pieces of the puzzle that had to be put together to actually make it happen. Or just traffic cones that need to be moved in the next couple minutes. It's amazing.
That's my favorite part of the collective. I can post on Facebook all day long, but when I'm in those meetings, I'm actually seeing how these things are moving and able to have a voice in how these changes are taking place or knowing when things will be happening down the pipeline. It's made being a business owner on my block, in my neighborhood, that much more both meaningful and manageable.
Yeah. But I bet too that it kind of helps you see these types of projects—or because I feel like sometimes when we think about cities and how change happens, it can feel very unclear, very bureaucratic, very technical. It sounds to me like in those meetings, it kind of all feels human again. Someone's like, "Oh, I'll get you that water thing that you need, that water cart," or "I'll go move those barricades." I think those little moments kind of humanize the city in a way that it might not feel very human when you're just filling out a form on a website, hoping that someone from some random department gets back to you before your 50th birthday.
Right. Or the next 10 to 80 years. No, for sure. That's the way I've described it multiple times to folks, is that it simply humanizes the process. Whenever I'm able to see why it is that they can't approve something—and it's because, actually, there's a really interesting sort of take on this. They recently did redo some traffic things on our street, and then it ended up being extended just beyond an intersection to the other side of the intersection. Everyone was all up in arms because it was going to be different, and the timeline was wrong, and all these things. In those meetings, I learned that that's because our street is a city-owned road, and that part of the street, literally 200 feet away, is state-owned. The city has no say whatsoever in any way, shape, or form as to what happens with that road. They can go in and try to say some things, but they have no ability to move things. If I had not known that, if I hadn't been in the room where I'm seeing them be just as exasperated as we are, but knowing that it is completely out of their control and there's nothing they can do—humanized immediately.
So let's talk about some of those changes because I know that, from talking with you earlier, there was a pretty—it was in the news—a pretty horrible car accident that happened near your shop, and you were part of kind of helping business owners in your collective navigate the conversations around the changes that the city proposed in response to that accident to make the street safer. Can you tell us about what happened there and then what were those conversations like? What were some of the fears you were hearing? I'll ask a follow-up question after that, but maybe you can just tell us the story and then what the conversations were like within the collective about the potential changes, proposed changes?
Yeah, absolutely. I do feel like this is—as awful as it was, because it was an awful accident—this seed that sprouted so much good change for our neighborhood. So two years ago, on Small Business Saturday, of all days, an intoxicated driver goes barreling down our little commerce street. So lined on either side of our street is small shops and restaurants, and everyone is out on the sidewalks doing their Small Business Saturday shopping. He comes barreling through, skids out of control, hits a building, and kills two people and leaves the third member of this family handicapped and paralyzed, if I'm not mistaken. Absolutely awful thing that happened. I was in the store that day. I remember hearing the sirens, everyone running out, and then everyone's running in, and it was utter chaos. It had just horrible results.
It absolutely caused an immediate uproar and call for change that began a process of change that happened way faster than I've ever seen anything in my life when it comes to the city doing things, which was amazing to see. It completely changed the streetscape of our street. So apparently, for years, there had been talk of changing our street's traffic pattern down from four and sometimes five lanes, which is way too many for how much space is there and how many shops and pedestrian-friendly zones there needed to be, but nothing had happened. If rumor is correct, a lot of it was because of the collective that I am now a part of. Apparently, they were very against making those changes 10 years ago for no good reason, I don't think, but were very vocal about not wanting change to happen.
So when this happened, all of that stuff came back up, and the city was basically like, "We don't care. We're doing it anyway. We are going to make some changes to how this street is designed to make it more safe and therefore allow less traffic through." That period of time is when I got back involved because I wanted to be in that room and see how things were being handled and to hopefully be a voice of opposition to their opposition and hopefully help them understand and help implement some changes. I don't know how much I helped, really, but I do know that I was in the room being an informed voice in a conversation and championing the changes because I definitely know they needed to happen.
My own experience of the street was ongoing terrified. I have to cross that street every time I go into my store, and I was almost getting hit easily once a week, and not just me but my employees, my child walking across the street as she's going into work as well. So it was terrifying, and it needed to change. This accident happening really got everyone who needed to be on board, on board to make the change.
The business owners in my area were scared. They definitely believed that less traffic meant fewer customers. They were convinced it was going to take away all of their parking. It didn't. It ended up adding more parking. They were convinced that construction would ruin their business. So those were the things that I was continuing to hear—all very short-term problems that they just could not get beyond, as opposed to seeing what benefits could come from it. I remember being in a, quote-unquote, "vote"—because I'm going to put air quotes around it—as to whether or not the collective would be vocally for or against this change. I was outvoted, and they were against it in a way that I was not okay with.
I ended up making some comments about—as a geographer who does have some education, not much, but some more than anyone else in the room, as to urban planning and those kinds of things—the changes that were being proposed were good. But it took them, even until now—and the changes were implemented a year ago—to see that maybe it wasn't so bad. I absolutely know that some of them still hate it, even though my business is doing great and most of the businesses on our block are seeing more revenue because of this change and because of all the events and things we're doing because of the change.
Yeah. So why do you think that fear is so entrenched? Because I feel like that's something that comes up a lot when you're talking about streets and thinking about how can we make the streets safer and thereby make them more productive. You get these classic fears of, "Oh, well, if we disrupt traffic flow at all, or if we disrupt parking at all, we're going to lose—we're going to negatively affect the productivity of our businesses," when it's pretty obvious to me that the people you want to move through that street are people on foot. If you actually want more transactions, cars moving through don't really stop and make purchases. It's people who are out of their car that make the purchases. But I'm just curious, why do you think this is such an entrenched fear or myth, I guess? And then, what advice would you have for people who are maybe in a similar position where they're trying to help people see the value of something like closing a street to traffic or having that festival that you mentioned, maybe trying something like that in one of their business districts but running into the same opposition?
So one of the things that I experienced a lot, and I really learned to see the difference, whenever I was running my branding, web design agency and I was working with online entrepreneurs and brick-and-mortars—brick-and-mortar business owners, these are two very different kinds of people. People who operate online businesses and have really maybe even never been in the brick-and-mortar world, or just definitely are not now, have a different view of business and change that I think is very much so fed by how algorithms change every three to six months, or how there's just new ways of doing things. There's a new social media platform. We're going to try this new thing for our email marketing. We're going to change our call to action. There just is this acceptance that if you're running an online business, you better be changing every day.
Martha Stewart has a really great little quote. She's like, "When you're done changing, you're done," or something like that that I think is just marvelous. I think that online business owners, we get that. We get that things are always changing. Brick-and-mortar store owners do not have that in the same way. So for those of us who have never been in that space or have always just been in this other online business space, it's almost unfathomable how stuck in how they've always done things they are until you prove them otherwise. So I will just start with that. It's something that I experienced a long time ago, and that I absolutely see all the time now. They are not okay with anything new happening in general unless you can somehow already have proven to them that it's worth it, even though sometimes there is proof and they don't accept it.
I will also say that, in all fairness to them, brick-and-mortar store owners, especially your indie mom-and-pop stationery stores, boutiques, whatever it may be, are usually running on such a thin margin that they simply can't afford to test and change. So that absolutely feeds a lot of this as well, that if something is going to change, they literally might have to close up shop. So that's something that I always have to keep in mind as well, is that they just have to have that proof because they're not going to take that leap of faith. It's not innate to how it is that they've ever run their businesses or how they probably ever will. So there has to be some sort of proving along the way.
Luckily for the way that the street change happened where we are, they kind of didn't have a choice. They had their vote, they had their point of view, they had their say, and the city did it anyway. I think that was really important, and I'm so glad they did that. They did just finally do it without the sign-off from what is really a relatively small group of business owners directly on the street that this was happening. But whatever, they did it anyway, and I think that's great.
But for me, it was really about sharing some facts as much as I could along the way. So some things that I knew were true—one of the things I kept saying to them is it's not about who's traveling through, it's about who's traveling to. No one is stopping in our neighborhood because the traffic is going through quickly through our neighborhood. It also helped that once the plan came out, there was more parking that was going to be included, not less parking. Brick-and-mortar-store-only brick-and-mortar store owners talk fluently in parking spots, so as long as you can prove to them that there will be more parking spots, then they will usually sit down and see how things go.
As it has gone, it has been really about showing what good these changes have done. So my friend up the street has started doing monthly markets using the pedestrian zones that have been added from the street redesign, and people are seeing increases of revenue from even just those events. Doing the street closure where we were actually able to literally turn off car traffic—all of these stores had some of their biggest days ever. It was a moment of proof that, "See, this was a good thing. Let's keep going."
It's been really gratifying watching a complete change of tune from some of the people that I very much so remember being incredibly anti-change and even anti-markets and anti-shutting down the street and anti all of these things, even within the past couple of weeks, come around and be like, "So can we be involved in the next thing that you're doing? Can you shut down our parking spots too?"
I think part of that is a combination of what you've mentioned before—being relational—but I think it's also, you know, introducing changes incrementally. It's like, "Hey, well, we're going to—you're not saying, 'We're going to close the street to cars forever.' You're just like, 'Hey, twice a year. You'll survive.'" And maybe that grows into three times a year or once a month or something like that. So I think taking that incremental approach can be a way to help persuade people in addition to using facts and data and all of these other things.
But I think when I think about safe and productive streets, I always try to talk about the sidewalk and the asphalt. Well, what's happening on the asphalt and what's happening on the sidewalk, and which one is actually better for your business? And so let's get more—which one do we want? Do we actually want more cars driving through? Do we want more people walking by? And what are ways that we can encourage that? I think there's so much benefit not just thinking about it in terms of revenue and are we going to make more money, but also thinking about it in terms of the bond people have to places. People are not going to feel quite as bonded if they're blazing through everywhere at 30 to 50 miles an hour, but when they've been on a street on their two feet and they've been able to pop into different shops and talk to people and rub shoulders with other people who live there, it's just a totally different experience, and it really shapes how you feel about the place that you live. I think there's something to be said for that benefit as well.
Yeah, I love that—asphalt versus sidewalk. I might use that one if that's all right. That's a great one. But yeah, I will also say one of the things that has been the most helpful too is just doing it anyway. I think that's both the city just doing it anyway, or whenever I think about my friend down the street who just did her markets anyway because she was definitely getting naysayers as she was doing planning it or doing her first or the second. Or even for Fraser Festival, we had business owners who didn't want us to do it, and we did it anyway because you have to prove it. You have to prove it to them for their own benefit, not just, "Here's some proof from someone else's experience six months ago or whatever," but when you can prove it to them, they get on board real fast.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been fantastic. It's been great to hear your story and what you've been learning through your own journey and also being part of this community in that way. Closing out, I'd love it if you could share with us a little bit about maybe Fraser—is it Avenue? I think Fraser Street. Fraser Avenue. And what are some of your favorite places to tell people to visit if they come through your town?
Yeah, absolutely. Fraser is the cutest street of stores in Chattanooga. So if you're there and you want to see indie shops, you should definitely come to, quote-unquote, North Shore and really Fraser Avenue. There's so much good stuff happening. I love Fraser Five & Dime is where I like to go get—they have a nice twist on the espresso martini called a Thirsty Cougar, which is delicious. It's one of my favorite cocktails. Almanac is there with our candles and crystals. You can shop Japanese stationery at Igo Tokyo. My friend Becca's store is called Vera Noire. She has dark art and plants. There's a place called Basecamp where you can get some really amazing wings and sit on a patio with the best view of the city. There is all kinds of things to do on Fraser Avenue. It is my second home. In all honesty, if I were to place a second reason that I moved to Chattanooga, second only to how beautiful it is, it's really how much I've always loved that street.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Emily. Thanks for taking time to come on the show and share your story with us.
Absolutely. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
And to our listeners, we learned about Emily because somebody filled out the suggested guest form and nominated her to come on the show. So if there's someone in your community who you think we should have on, please use the same form. It's always in our show notes. Tell us all about them, especially as we're planning out the next year of episodes. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.