Branding label promotes items from Delta region
Posted on Monday, January 7, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/213021/
Chance Williams wants you to do your shopping in Tyronza instead of the mall. Buy a painting from Marianna, find honey in Osceola or a get a wirewrapped gemstone pendant made in Piggott.
“If you have the option, why not purchase something that you can experience another person through ?” Williams, a student at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, said recently. “You are connecting to someone else and it’s not coming off an assembly line.”
Williams and two other Clinton School students, Sarah Argue and Julie West, are trying to revive self-sustaining local economies by helping artisans and craftspeople in the Arkansas Delta get their products onto shelves in mom-and-pop stores in Delta towns.
The Arkansas DeltaMade branding program was unveiled in October and was created by a local business development task force and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Rural Heritage Development Initiative. More than 40 arts and crafts producers and 16 retailers are participating. They come from 15 counties in the Arkansas Delta region.
The program is designed to benefit both artisans and entrepreneurs in the Delta, said Beth Wiedower, field representative with the National Trust. Instead of being sold online in a centralized Web site, the products are placed on the shelves of local retailers. Many have downtown storefronts like drug stores and gift shops. Shop owners gain a tourist-friendly niche that separates them from big-box retailers.
“You are taking home a piece of the Delta,” Wiedower said of people who buy the products, “and you are also supporting the local economy.”
The products include items such as honey, BBQ rubs and sauces, paintings, photographs, wood carvings, handbags, jewelry, produce, rice and crawfish and reproductions of antique flower girl dresses.
The Clinton School students are working on the DeltaMade program for one of their required public-service projects as they pursue their master’s degrees. They’ve helped the program progress further, faster, Wiedower said. The students have gathered information from the craftsmen and retailers about what they need to become more stable and successful.
“They are the ones who are meeting one-on-one with the shop owner or the potter or the salsa maker,” Wiedower said.
The students have queried the business owners on their accounting systems, online operations, marketing, and growth and expansion plans. The shop owners and artisans can be connected with community organizations and nonprofits that can provide that technical assistance.
The program is focused on more than bringing new money into the area, said West, one of the Clinton School students.
“It’s really about helping Delta people stay in the Delta, which is where they live and where they want to stay,” she said.
West is a Little Rock resident and native of the Alabama Gulf Coast. She has a nursing degree from the University of South Alabama and was director of the High-Risk Pregnancy Program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Argue is a Little Rock native and graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She was previously a fifth-grade teacher in public schools in Boston. As an Arkansan, she says she has a long-term investment in improving Arkansas’ economy and education system.
“DeltaMade has a lot of jazz that can make it successful and bring the excitement of economic development to the region,” she said. “It’s not just people descending and throwing money at any kind of given problem.”
While the products come exclusively from the Delta, Argue said all Arkansans should take pride in the them.
“People in Springdale and people in Hope and people in Texarkana should be just as excited about the products of Arkansas DeltaMade as people in Helena and Blytheville.”
Williams is from Denver and has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the Miami University in Ohio. His favorite product is a line of soy candles. The soy is grown in the Delta, giving it another connection to the area.
The candle maker, Marion resident Stacy Parker, said she has picked up several new wholesale accounts since joining the DeltaMade project.
She and her husband make and sell candles made from soy beans grown in the Delta. Southern Soy Scents was started after the airline industry’s troubles following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Both Parker and her husband, Tim Parker, were airline pilots and were looking for another way to make a living.
The Parkers are excited about DeltaMade’s potential.
“Once it gets up and running and solid I think it’s going to be a great source of advertisements,” she said.
Since the Rural Heritage Development Initiative ends in a year and a half, the students hope to find a “home” for the DeltaMade project. That may be with an entrepreneur, a nonprofit foundation, a university program or some other entity. The students will continue their work in the spring semester and host a marketplace of the products at the school in Little Rock on March 16.
A list of the products and locations where they are sold is available at www. arkansasdeltamade. com.