COLLABORATION
Local Tourist —
Culture First
No corporate safety net, no familiar consumer. Just raw creative instincts in uncharted territory. This is where flexibility gets built.
Project Year :
2012-2017
Role :
Brand & Content Lead
Scope:
Apparel · Video · Brand Creative
Approach:
Cultural Collaboration · Creative Vision
Problem :
Local Tourist Clothing Co. was a streetwear label operating at the intersection of Minneapolis and LA hip-hop culture. No corporate backing. No established playbook. A culturally sophisticated audience that can spot inauthenticity from across the room.
The creative had to earn its place in every room it entered. No brief prepares you for that.
Solution :
Working from the owner's vision, I developed brand creative across apparel design, graphic content, and video production.
Artists including Curren$y, Lil Debbie, Paperwater, Pac Div, and others wore Local Tourist apparel on stage at events ranging from 100-person basement shows to concert halls of 5,000. I produced video content and graphic assets for performances and surrounding events. During a summer concert series in Minneapolis, I led an interview series with performers that generated authentic brand content across emerging social platforms — at a time when Instagram video was brand new.
Minneapolis to LA. Boutique retail. Live events. Built from a brief and a creative instinct.
Challenge :
The real skill here wasn't access. It was judgment.
Knowing what an artist would actually wear on stage versus what looked good in a flat lay. Understanding what felt authentic on screen versus what felt produced. Reading a room and making creative decisions in real time with no style guide and no approval process to fall back on.
That kind of judgment only develops when the stakes are real and the safety net is gone. It shaped how I approach every creative problem since.
Summary :
Local Tourist was early career work. It was also the real world.
Independent brand. Real artists. Real stages. Real creative accountability from day one. Before influencer marketing was a strategy, I was doing it. The instincts built here — cultural awareness, collaborative creative, content for emerging platforms — show up in everything I've built since.
