Local Kansas City Businesses Swoon Over Taylor Swift, Crediting Her for Major Spike in Sales

Local businesses at Kansas City, Missouri are rooting for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s “Love Story” as their widely-publicized relationship has prompted a surge in sales. Since the Kansas City Chiefs tight end and the 14-time Grammy award winning singer confirmed their romance in October 2023, Ms. Swift has been spotted supporting her beau by attending Chiefs games and wearing the team’s signature red-and-black gear. Their relationship “has been great, just in general, for anybody that’s making any kind of products within Kansas City” that are related to the celebrity duo, owner of one local boutique, Westside Storey, told Fox on Monday. Things changed for the Kansas City store owner, Chris Harrington, when the pop-star was photographed last year wearing one of his boutique’s vintage Chiefs sweatshirt while attending a football game at Arrowhead Stadium. Since then, Ms. Swift has purchased and worn several other items from the store. “It’s different for everybody, but for us and the fact that she has shopped us through her team a couple different times, to be completely honest, it’s kind of changed our trajectory,” the store owner, Mr. Harrington, told Fox on Monday.As a result, Westside Storey saw one of the “biggest” Decembers in its history — and the surge in business has continued even through the off season, Mr. Harrington told Fox. “Not that we weren’t doing OK before, but the amount of traffic, and the amount of traffic online, and the amount of people coming in and talking about that experience of having Taylor shop out there, it has done so much for us in sales, done so much for us as far as publicity and media,” he said.Meanwhile, Westside Storey has taken steps to cater to their new Swift-loving customers, selling T-shirts emblazoned with messages such as, “I Heart Taylor,” and “Who’s Travis Kelce Anyway? Ew.” They’ve even made a “‘Rookie of the Year” shirt covered in images of the beloved singer-songwriter. Other Kansas City business owners are following suit. Elle Steadman, who founded clothing store Pink Dinosaur, saw a steady rise in business after she started to make Taylor Swift-inspired merchandise, selling trucker caps that say “Red Era” and sweatshirts adorned with the slogan “Who’s Afraid of Little Old KC Football (You Should Be).”“Our online presence has grown 170 percent,” Ms. Steadman told USA Today. “We were stuck at 26,000 followers on Instagram for a long, long time, but after (Swift) came to a game we grew to 41,000.”The owner of EB and Co., the boutique store that sold the No. 87 jersey ring that Ms. Swift wore to the AFC championship game, credits the pop star with triggering an 83 percent rise in sales for the year — a boost that allowed her to buy her “dream home.” “It’s been kind of bananas,” store owner, Emily Bordner, told USA Today. “I’ve been in business for about 12 years and when Taylor wore our ring, everyone started tagging us.” Photos of Ms. Swift wearing the ring — which is of a small red jersey emblazoned with Mr. Kelce’s number, 87 — quickly went viral. According to the Media and Production Manager of a major licensed sport retailer, Rally House, national demand for female items and Chiefs apparel has grown since Ms. Swift began attending Mr. Kelce’s games in the fall of last year. Colin Novick told Fox that their relationship has “opened a door” for Rally House “to hit a different demographic that is new to watching the Chiefs on Sundays.” Given that the company will often see a “major lift” in demand for merchandise directly after it is worn by Ms. Swift, Mr. Novick has been making sure to stock up Rally House with the kind of inventory that the pop singer wears at games to ensure that the business is “really set up for success right away.” Taylor Swift’s boost for Kansas City is yet another example of her outsized impact on local economies — a phenomenon so prevalent that it has been dubbed “Swiftonomics” and boasts its own Investopedia page. Some of that is credited to Ms. Swift’s high-spending fans, many of whom are Millennials and Gen Zs that generated historically high levels of savings during Covid. As the pop star has taken the world by storm this past year with her sensational Eras tour, her fans have been more than happy to dole out four figures to see Ms. Swift perform live. Ms. Swift has already attended two Chiefs games this season, though she will likely have to miss out later this month when her Eras tour starts back up again. Her whirlwind tour, however, is slated to end on December 8 with a show at Vancouver.

Local Kansas City Businesses Swoon Over Taylor Swift, Crediting Her for Major Spike in Sales

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