CAMAS — Camas business leaders and city officials joined hundreds of residents at the Grains of Wrath brewery on Wednesday to welcome the producers of the online show “Small Business Revolution — Main Street.”
The community’s goal was simple: make the biggest splash possible in order to convince the show crew that Camas should advance in the running to appear as the featured city on the show’s upcoming fourth season.
“It’s so great to see so many people coming together,” said Brittany Nugent, a volunteer with the Downtown Camas Association. “We have such a diverse but welcoming community.”
The show airs on Hulu, YouTube and the website smallbusinessrevolution.org. Each season highlights a group of six small businesses in a featured city. The producers spend a month working with the owners to give the businesses a makeover and revitalize the city’s downtown area. Previous winners were Wabash, Ind.; Bristol Borough, Pa.; and Alton, Ill.
The show is produced by Deluxe Corp., a small business financial and marketing consulting firm based in Saint Paul, Minn. It began as a way to try to spread the word about the company’s services, but it evolved into a broader revitalization project, according to Cameron Potts, vice president of public affairs at Deluxe.
Camas was chosen to be a top 20 finalist in November out of 12,000 nominations, and it advanced to the top 10 round in December. The 10 will be narrowed down to five finalists in February, and the final winner will be chosen by a public vote.
The show’s producers will spend the rest of January on a whirlwind tour of all the top 10 towns, taking two days to get to know the community and visit with business leaders. Each stop on the tour includes a major community gathering.
“It gives the town a chance to be excited about this,” Potts said.
The producers’ tour schedule wasn’t released until around Christmas, so the Downtown Camas Association had only about a week to plan the event. Randy Curtis, the association’s board vice president, said they immediately began reaching out to business owners and printed out #MyCamas signs to go in store windows, along with 200 T-shirts for the event. The city’s business leaders have been using the hashtag to promote the campaign on social media.
Potts and other producers arrived on Wednesday and spent the afternoon visiting a number of local businesses including Mill City Brew Werks, Cake Happy and Arktana Shoes before heading over to Grains of Wrath for the main event.
Camas was first on the tour list, and the business community was eager to make a lasting impression. The downtown restaurant was packed with hundreds of people, many wearing #MyCamas shirts.
“It was just about elbow-to-elbow,” Curtis said.
The street outside was closed to traffic, but most of the attendees pushed their way into the warmer interior area, where they got a chance to chat and take selfies with the show’s co-host, Amanda Brinkman.
“Just hearing everyone yell ‘My Camas,’ it was just a very proud moment,” said Camas Mayor Shannon Turk. “I can’t imagine that any other community is going to be able to have this kind of response.”
On Thursday morning, the show crew met with the assembled business community and city leaders to hear Camas’s pitch for becoming a top five finalist, and spent the rest of the day visiting more businesses and shooting video.
Curtis said the city’s business and political leaders have taken a careful approach when deciding how to portray Camas during the campaign. The challenge, he said, was to highlight the strength of the small-town community and businesses while still making it clear that the city could benefit from a Main Street revitalization project.
Curtis pointed to the closure of the Camas Mill as the town’s biggest current challenge, but he described it as the fourth in a series of historic challenges that the town has been able to overcome through creative actions.
In the 1960s, he said, business leaders responded to the rise of shopping centers by revitalizing Camas’s Fourth Avenue shopping area. In the 1980s, the city reacted to rumors of an impending mill closure by adding new commercial areas in order to diversify its employer lineup. More recently, the Downtown Camas Association was founded in 2009 to help the community weather the Great Recession.
“Each time, it was really the spirit and the energy from local folks,” he said. “This time, I think we need some outside expertise.”
Regardless of whether Camas wins, Turk and Curtis both said they hoped the community’s campaign for the show will serve as a rallying point to help direct the city’s energy toward new downtown improvement efforts.
