I walked to the end of my block on Saturday and then kept going, because there was nowhere else to be. Eleven blocks later I was standing outside a hardware store I have lived four minutes from for six years and never once entered.
They had a hand-lettered sign about seed starts in the window. A phone number, not a URL. Somebody's actual handwriting.
I bought potting soil I did not need.
The trade press is calling this a return to local, which is true and also lazy. Nothing returned. The local brands were always there. What changed is that my radius collapsed from a metro area to a walk, and inside that walk the competitive set is about nine businesses instead of nine hundred.
Proximity is not a discovery channel. It is a filter, and when travel stops it becomes the only filter most people have left.
Which is why the local brands doing well right now are not the ones with the best websites. They are the ones legible from the sidewalk. Salt & Straw made a line into an event years before anyone had to stand six feet apart in it. The bakery on my corner chalks up what is left at two in the afternoon, and by three that chalkboard is a scarcity signal it never set out to build.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where local always got framed as a stage you graduate out of. You start local, you go regional, you go national, you get an agency of record and a tagline nobody remembers. Local was the awkward phase.
Here is the part that gets lost. Local is not a size. It is a relationship with a specific set of streets, and it is the one form of brand equity that cannot be bought at scale, only imitated badly. Every national chain paying for neighborhood-inspired store design is spending real money to fake what the hardware store has for free.
Local is not a size. It is a relationship with a specific set of streets, and it is the one form of brand equity that cannot be bought at scale, only imitated badly.
The risk is that this ends. Radii expand again, people get on planes, and the hardware store goes back to being a building I walk past. If you run a local brand, the work of the next year is converting a captive audience into a chosen one. Get the names. Learn the faces. Be worth eleven blocks after eleven blocks stop being mandatory.
Truffles watched me carry the soil in and left the room. Barnaby sat in the bag. Neither of them has walked eleven blocks in his life, and both of them have stronger opinions about where they live than most brands do.