THE ROAD TO WELL
Good intentions have been paying off in a big way, as the millions of dollars raised by sales of Katrina-related merchandise are building houses, buying instruments for musicians and helping City Park meet expenses
Sunday, September 30, 2007
By Susan Langenhennig
Michael Harris lives in a house built by T-shirts.
The singer/bassist and his 17-year-old son, Michael Jr., moved into their new gray and white cottage on Aug. 21, two of the newest residents of the Musicians' Village in the Upper 9th Ward.
It cost the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity $75,000 to build Harris' 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom home.
The money didn't come from some big corporate donation. It was raised, at $20 a pop, through the sale of Save NOLA T-shirts.
"We started out by putting up a table on Magazine Street, and we thought we'd make a thousand dollars," said Clare Durrett, one of the volunteers behind the fleur-de-lis-emblazoned cotton tops. "We sold out in two hours, 200 T-shirts and caps. And we thought, well, we might be on to something here."
All told, the Save NOLA folks -- a loose volunteer group ranging from eight to 12 people, many of whom lost their own homes to Katrina -- have raised a bit more than the $75,000 needed for Harris' house.
"It's phenomenal, really," Durrett said, still shocked by the receipts rung up in less than 24 months on the group's Web site, www.savenolanow.com, and in local boutiques. Purchases have been sent to Argentina, Canada and Germany.
The group gives all net proceeds from its products -- shirts to hats to coffee mugs -- to local charities linked to home-building.
The Save NOLA shirts are just one of dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of products that bobbed up in the storm's wake to raise money for hurricane relief and rebuilding.
First came the lemonade stand-style sales on street corners of hometown-proud caps and car magnets.
Then came products targeted to more sophisticated shoppers -- $75 silver fleur-de-lis pendants to benefit a foundation helping artists; $500 George Rodrigue Blue Dog posters to help the New Orleans Museum of Art; and dozens of $20 music compilations, whose riffs and refrains generated dollars for local musicians' aid agencies.
Even Style.com, the online fashion bible of Vogue and W magazines, touted $320 Hermès silk scarves benefiting New Orleans City Park. A Google search at the time found everything from plastic arm bands to Christmas ornaments to six packs of Abita Brewing Co.'s Restoration Ale with Katrina donation tie-ins.
Taking stock some two years later, a skeptic may wonder where all the money went.
While there's no data tracking total dollars generated through such independent charitable merchandise sales, a quick survey of nine of the more high-profile pieces showed an impressive sum. Sales of products ranging from T-shirts to bottles of beer to DVDs raised more than $3 million combined for local nonprofits.
The yearning to shop for items linked to hurricane relief efforts was as intense as the desire to produce the merchandise.
"I gave my nieces and nephews all New Orleans T-shirts for the Christmas after the storm to not only support some of the local charities, but to instill pride in New Orleans," said Mary Beth Romig, director of communications for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Romig, whose Lakeview home was swallowed by the flood, also scooped up fleur-de-lis jewelry to replace lost pieces and bought her daughter a necklace with a music note pendant because "it fit her passion and it was also for a good cause (raising money to help struggling musicians). I saw it and bought it immediately."
Indulging in such charitable retail therapy proved a panacea for many residents mired in a painfully slow rebuilding process. It also had the side effect of shoring up local cultural institutions and companies drowning in Katrina's economic backwash.
Such was the case for jewelry designer Mignon Faget, whose company has donated $155,000 to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. The money primarily has come through the sale of her fleur-de-lis pendants, necklaces and earrings.
Those proceeds have turned into grants to replace lost paints and brushes, horns and drums for local artists and musicians, said Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who set up the foundation to "get money directly into the hands of artists who needed it after Katrina and Rita."
"To think we've raised that much money when we thought we might go bankrupt ourselves back in September 2005," said Virginia Saussy, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Mignon Faget.
"When the storm hit, we had just purchased all of the metals for holiday '05. We came back and opened the doors on Magazine Street to an empty city. We didn't know if we were going to make it. Mignon says the fleur-de-lis saved our business."
The historic French symbol, reinterpreted by many local designers, quickly became New Orleans' unofficial badge of courage. Anything adorned with the image flew off store shelves.
Even while Faget's staff was still scattered around the country, her company's Web site was logging orders from customers.
"We had a woman e-mail us with about a thousand-dollar Web order," Saussy said. "She said, 'I'm trying to find a way to help the city, and if I can keep you all in business, maybe that will help.' "
From Sept. 1, 2005, through the end of that year, Faget dedicated 10 percent of all fleur-de-lis sales to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. Then in 2006, she gave 5 percent of sales of specific Katrina-related pieces, including a Rebirth Ribbon and an Anniversary Amulet, to the foundation. Faget, whose company now has 100 employees, up from 80 before the hurricane, picked the foundation because she recognized the economic and cultural importance of the arts to the city, Saussy said. "Mignon is an artist who employs artisans," Saussy said, so "she was very interested in helping to bring back artists to the city."
Across Lake Pontchartrain, just two months after the storm, Abita Brewing Co. was mixing up a batch of malted barley into a new recipe: Fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale.
Since it launched the brew in October 2005, the company has donated $1 from the sale of every six pack of the ale to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, generating $400,000 so far for the nonprofit fund set up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The company anticipates it will raise an additional $100,000 before the donation ends at the end of this month.
"We felt like we had to do something to help out, and when we thought about it, we thought the thing we do best is make beer," said David Blossman, president of the company.
"Normally a launch of a new product is about an eight- or nine-month process, but with the help of our artists, suppliers and the federal government -- which pushed through our label approval -- we got it done much quicker."
Abita also printed up T-shirts, caps and lapel pins with the Restoration Ale logo, and all net proceeds from that merchandise also went to the foundation, Blossman said.
When Pat Baldwin read in the newspaper that French fashion house Hermès had reissued its New Orleans-themed scarf, she had to have one. "I sent an e-mail to the Hermès store in Paris, and they referred me to the Hermès store on Park Avenue in New York, and I got the black one," she said. The colorful, jazz-themed square of silk replaced one of three cherished Hermès scarves Baldwin had owned before the storm. "They all drowned in the flood . . . I live in Eden Isles, and our house had six feet of water," she said.
It was easy for Baldwin to rationalize the purchase: Hermès contributed 10 percent from the scarf sales to New Orleans City Park. "If I'm going to buy it anyway, then I might buy something that helps," she said. "I thought it was for a good cause. I believe in supporting the city, and I want to see the city come back."
Apparently she isn't alone. Those Hermès scarves raised $27,000 for City Park, said John Hopper, the park's director of development.
"It's real money, and it helps," he said.
But it wasn't only replacements of cherished possessions that many residents were seeking in their post-storm shopping.
There were a lot of businesses who saw an unexpected climb in (sales of) luxury items after the storm," said Janet Speyrer, professor of economics and associate dean for research at the University of New Orleans College of Business.
"To an economist, at first it just didn't make sense that jewelers would be having such a big year when there was so much of our lives destroyed," Speyrer said. "But people were buying things to make themselves feel better, luxury cars, jewelry, expensive things. Spouses felt so bad for their wife or husband, they went out and bought them something special."
Such purchases sent local sales tax collections soaring. For the first six months of 2006, Jefferson Parish sales tax revenues went up 41 percent and St. Tammany recorded a 48.6 percent jump as compared with the same period a year prior.
Products with tie-ins to Katrina relief only made purchases that much easier.
"People who lived through this were looking to buy and wear something that said 'I'm here, I'm supporting the effort, I survived the storm,' " Speyrer said.
Then there were the out-of-town buyers, those who fell in love with New Orleans' cobblestone streets and jazz-filled haunts long before Katrina and were broken-hearted about what happened. Other purchases were taken home by the many caring volunteers who came here to help the recovery effort by gutting flooded houses.
"I gave out some (New Orleans music) CDs that benefited Katrina victims at a conference after the storm, and people just hugged them," Speyrer said. "It was as if I gave away so much more than music. If you were a visitor and could buy something like that, it simply made you feel good."
Among organizations on the receiving end of Katrina-related product sales is the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.
To make sure its name is not used in vain, the nonprofit group has anyone who wants to fundraise on its behalf sign a contract, said Gina Stilp, the local Habitat affiliate's development coordinator.
"We have every company or individual sign a letter of intent with the terms of the fundraiser, how long they'll run the benefit," Stilp said. "That ensures it's a legitimate fundraiser not only to Habitat, but also to the customer.
"We are protective of the Habitat name, that it's being used with good motive and for a good product," she added.
To date, Stilp said, she hasn't heard of any cases in which a product used the Habitat fundraising hook without actually anteing up the money generated.
"We have had very positive experience thus far," she said. "Occasionally we will have people send out press releases without talking to us first, but I've never had an instance where we couldn't reach them and say, 'OK, let's back up a step and get that letter of intent."
Stilp points to Save NOLA as one of its "standouts." Habitat worked with the group's volunteers, tracked their fund-raising progress, and when they'd reached $75,000 "we assigned a (building) lot and a partner family."
Another high-dollar contributor was the Home Shopping Network. It held a promotion last September at Harrah's Casino in New Orleans, featuring cookware created by Todd English, the chef behind Riche, a restaurant at Harrah's Hotel. "They donated 5 percent of the sales of the cookware on those two days," Stilp said. Ultimately, Habitat received a $72,000 check.
A nationwide audience also whipped out their wallets for The Concert for New Orleans held Sept. 20, 2005, at New York's Madison Square Garden. Concert sales and proceeds from a DVD of the event, "From the Big Apple to the Big Easy," generated a combined $1.49 million for Habitat's house-building efforts here.
But Stilp also acknowledges the importance of smaller contributions raised through the sale of items made by individuals, schools or churches.
She points to $1,500 raised by the local Hard Rock Cafe. "Their store manager has been great at doing benefits, and they're in the process of designing a pin that will have a purple Habitat house on it.
"And a high school in the Chicago area has a goal of producing 2,000 CDs and selling them, and they also are anticipating sending some students to be volunteers," she said.
If so, they'll number among the hundreds of volunteers who, over the past months, have descended on Alvar and North Roman streets to wield hammers in the Musicians' Village.
Such volunteer labor, combined with money from donations, gets the Habitat houses built. Habitat then sells them to qualified families through a zero-interest mortgage. In lieu of a down payment, the home buyer must put in 350 hours of "sweat equity," joining in the construction of the house.
"It's truly overwhelming, the lessons this teaches on so many levels," said new home owner Harris, a musician who plays with Sunpie Barnes and sings in the Shades of Praise gospel choir. Prior to moving into his Musicians' Village cottage, he and his son lived for almost two years in a one-room apartment in the Lower Garden District after Katrina washed away his Lower 9th Ward house.
"I'm just truly humbled by the entire experience," he said, adding that he proudly wears his Save NOLA T-shirt. "I just keep thinking, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home."
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Susan Langenhennig can be reached at slangenhennig@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3379.
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