Sad news from New Orleans, with the announced closure at the end of December of t-shirt shop Storyville, which is run by former dinner interviewees Josh and Natalie Harvey.
Storyville specialized in unique and funny designs, and gained some notoriety in the Big Easy with a “Brad Pitt For Mayor” t-shirt that generated headlines locally and nationally. Other designs played off local imagery, including a happy looking beignet with the caption “Beign-yay!”
I was always a huge fan of their products, and still have several of their tees that I wear on a regular basis. It was my repeated trips to their Magazine Street store on my trips to the Crescent City that gave me the idea of finding out who owned the company and how they got started.
When I met the Harveys for lunch in their city back in 2013, Josh told me how he founded the company when he moved to New Orleans and launched it at a shop near the Louisiana State University campus. That’s where he met his future wife Natalie, and eventually they built Storyville into a business with a couple of locations and a seemingly limitless number of designs.
But according to a recent Facebook post, Storyville will close the doors of its Magazine Street location for the last time at the end of the month. Josh and Natalie say it’s time to move on after a couple of years of declining sales, and that they’ll focus on raising their two sons.
Josh and Natalie are incredibly friendly people and wonderful company — we’ve stayed in touch since the interview, and I wish them all the best for the future.