HOW IT BEGAN
When we received the news that fateful day in March 2020, that our businesses were being ordered to close and the first Stay At Home Order was imminent we, like everyone else, had no idea what was coming next. But what we did know was that to get through whatever was coming, we needed to figure it out…and fast.
We approached the pandemic with a different lens than many communities. We saw the posts saying things like “support our downtown businesses or they won’t be here”. We understood the sentiment, but for us, it didn’t ring true to who we were and the brand that we built with the community over the past decade. We were the town who brought the joy, the memory-making moments and we needed to continue to be that town because our community needed it now, more than ever.
Love Local Rochester started as just a quick graphic and a Facebook Group. The concept was to create a place for our community – both businesses and residents to have a place to connect and share. We launched the Love Local Rochester Facebook Group the next day and it hit like wildfire. People joined the page in mass, with over 1,000 members in the first week. What was most interesting is that people that joined the group took our Love Local Rochester logo and started using it as their personal Facebook Cover Photo. It was then that we realized that we had more than created a logo, but rather an idea that people could buy into and get behind.
Now that we had their attention, it was time to deliver on our promise to bring the joy, so that’s exactly what we did. We worked with our businesses to create a series of daily promotions featuring online specials, how-to videos, contests and more. We created unique content every day for our members, while keeping Downtown Rochester and our businesses top-of-mind with our community. We were posting multiple times a day with growing engagement every single day.
We didn’t realize how much the Love Local Rochester brand resonated with our community until we posted a single photo. We had Love Local Rochester Masks made for our team in anticipation of us returning to work in person. We posted a photo on the Facebook Group and the members went crazy, asking how they could purchase one. We hadn’t reached the point where we had conversations about monetizing the Love Local logo, but we saw an opportunity and quickly scrambled to pull it together. The next day, we added the Love Local Masks to our online shop. Within the first 2 hours, we had sold over 800 masks! That number grew to over 2,000 during the duration of the pandemic and currently 10k and counting today!
That led us to develop new products with the brand. For our businesses, we offered t-shirts, masks and branded social distancing posters and floor graphics. For the public, we offered coffee mugs, water bottles, tote bags, PopSockets and lanyards. For the downtown, we created disks for our Main Street light poles so that when our district could fully reopen, Love Local Rochester would transition from the virtual platform in which it was created to a downtown icon that delivered on the promise of community, of bringing the joy and of hope that we were all going to get through the pandemic together.
What began as a quick logo has become a brand and movement for our downtown. It is present in our promotions and events, as well as lending a new lens to how our committees approach their work. It has also become a great source of revenue to fund many of our downtown initiatives. To say that we set out to create a new brand for Downtown Rochester would be untrue, but that is exactly what happened. And that original page and logo has grown and transformed into a loyal community. Love Local Rochester is a part of who we are and that community engagement at this hyper-local level will continue to inform our decisions as we chart our community’s path forward.
TODAY
To follow the Love Local Rochester movement feel free to join our Facebook Page
