Last August, Chris Reams sat in a Las Vegas hotel room
transfixed to the TV. Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster
ever to hit the country, was unfolding live on the screen. "It
was like watching my own 9/11, only Mother Nature was the terrorist
this time," says Reams, 31. "I kept thinking of how
different the city I loved was going to be upon my return and
wondered what would be left." Of all the images of businesses
being destroyed, Reams desperately searched for one that would show
if his clothing shop, Ichabod's, had survived.
It didn't. Like tens of thousands of others, the business
was in ruins.
Reams had flown to Las Vegas a day before the storm hit to
attend a trade show. It would take him more than a month to return
home after staying with family members in St. Louis. He found that
although the shop had avoided the full affects of flooding, the
looters had spared nothing. "It was horrible," Reams
remembers. "I didn't stay in there long; I couldn't
bear it." They had broken in, stolen most of his goods and
destroyed what they couldn't take.
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Ichabod's had opened in New Orleans just a few months before
Katrina hit. The trendy clothing store featured many of Reams'
own designs. Originally located in nearby Covington, where he
lived, Reams had moved the operation in April, hoping to profit
from the lucrative young market provided by the nearby Tulane and
Loyola University campuses. "Normally, the summer is a slow
time for retail," Reams recalls. "We were taking it easy,
waiting for school to start."
When he returned to his home 30 minutes outside of New Orleans,
there wasn't much left to greet him. "I have a
plastic-sheet roof, no garage and plenty of debris," Reams
says. "I'm trying to keep from going crazy most
days."
While surveying the damage done to his house, Reams found that
his clothing inventory and screen-printing equipment had survived.
Determined to find a way to get back on his feet quickly, he took
what he could and set up a temporary workspace in his
fiancée's father's home in Covington.
With help from his sister and other friends who had internet
connections, Reams successfully re-launched his website in one week,
complete with new pictures of his shirts. But what really saved
Reams was his idea to talk to his competitor in New Orleans, Sarah
Wheelock, owner of Funky Monkey. Somehow, the vintage clothing
store across the street from his evaded the wrath of looters.
"Maybe people didn't want used clothing," Reams
laughs.
After reopening, Funky Monkey faced inventory trouble. Some of
the nearby residents of the city had moved back in, and they needed
clothes, but shipping was a nightmare. So Reams proposed an
alliance: He would supply her with his designs, and she would give
him 50 percent of the sales on his clothing. The partnership
worked, and Funky Monkey has even dedicated more space to
Reams' designs. With 2006 sales projected to exceed $500,000,
Reams says he--like many other business owners in the area--has no
plans to reopen his old store. (Seven other businesses on his
street have permanently closed.)
Says Reams of the lessons he learned from the disaster,
"[Katrina] forced me to really just move faster on some things
I should have done a long time ago, [like] converting [the website]
more... [and] getting to know your neighbors."