Courtesy of Lauren Haydel
Lauren LeBlanc Haydel, owner of the popular New Orleans t-shirt boutique, Fleurty Girl.
A rags-to-riches tale with a distinctly New Orleans twist, Lauren LeBlanc Haydel’s is a story of a woman and the city she loves, of a hairbrained idea that drew criticism from everyone that mattered to her, and the moxie to believe she just might pull it off.
It all begins with a single mom struggling to raise three kids, living paycheck to paycheck. The mortgage was in arrears. The electricity had been shut off once for non-payment. But hark, salvation arrived in the form of a $2,000 tax refund.
It was enough to get ahead on her mortgage. But Haydel found herself consumed by something she’d noticed in the thick of this difficult season, which also happened to be an especially good season for the New Orleans Saints and a generally celebratory time for the city as a whole. Everyone was wearing New Orleans on their t-shirts. “But all the available merchandise catered to men," she said. "There were no female-friendly cuts and necklines.”
Haydel had an idea.
She reached out to a creative friend, Valerie Foman, and asked her to illustrate three designs that celebrated New Orleans culture, trading her an armoire for the work. She spent her tax refund on screen-printing a total of 300 tees in those designs and began selling them out of her Denham Springs home. “I posted them on my Facebook page and friends shared it to their pages,” Haydel said. Before she knew it, she was selling out faster than she could print.
The brand name, Fleurty Girl, (an homage to the French fleur de lis which is synonymous with New Orleans) came to her one night while she was drinking an Abita Strawberry lager on her back porch. She made a dash for her laptop to nab the .com. “It was already taken by a flower blog in California,” Haydel said. “She’d taken it only a month before. I grabbed .net and, when she retired, I bought the .com from her.”
“I woke up to women lined up at my front door wanting t-shirts. I thought, ‘There’s no going back.’” —Lauren LeBlanc Haydel
Six months after launching her online shop, Haydel knew she needed a brick-and-mortar where customers could try the shirts on. She turned to Craigslist, and found a shotgun for rent on Oak Street, in which she could operate a store in front and live with her kids, all in one bedroom, in the back. "It took some time and convincing to get the landlord to rent it to me," she said. "I could not pass a credit check." She opened the first official Fleurty Girl location on the day of Po-boy Festival in November 2009.
It was just a few months later that the proverbial shit hit the fan. One of Haydel's most popular shirts was a simple black number with the words “#WhoDat” on it, celebrating the Saints during a stellar season. Haydel was at her “day job” at a local TV station when she received a cease-and-desist order from the NFL. “I called the girl I had selling the shirts and told her to, quick, pull that one off the shelf,” Haydel recalled.
“Then someone on Twitter asked where she could get a shirt, I explained about the cease and desist, and suddenly my phone was blowing up with TV stations wanting to know what the heck was going on. It all happened so fast.” Word spread about the controversy and on January 28, 2010, Haydel's David-and-Goliath story was the front page story in the Times Picayune.
Courtesy of Lauren Haydel
The Magazine Street, New Orleans location of Fleurty Girl.
In the end, it turns out the NFL didn’t own the popular New Orleans slogan, after all. It was owned by two brothers in Texas, Steve and Sal Monistere. Sometime later, Haydel came to an arrangement with them to continue using the phrase. But in the meantime,
New Orleans collectively learned Haydel’s story, and everybody wanted a Fleurty Girl t-shirt. “I literally couldn’t print them fast enough,” she said. “People no longer wanted the NFL shirts. They wanted something homegrown.”
Going all in, Haydel quit her full-time job. “I woke up to women lined up at my front door wanting t-shirts,” she said. “I thought, ‘There’s no going back.’ I did have a moment of doubt when they came to get my company car and I realized I no longer had insurance.”
In the end, Haydel credits the NFL’s mistake with putting Fleurty Girl on the map. “I think we would have been successful eventually, but the controversy catapulted us onto the New Orleans scene,” she said. She still has that cease-and-desist order and one of those original t-shirts.
By the time summer rolled around, Haydel was desperate to get the business out of her home. She turned to Craigslist again, and found a Magazine Street location for rent. “By the time I fixed it up, I only had a couple hundred dollars in the bank,” she said. She admits it was scary, but she’d been down this road before. Six months later, Haydel opened another location in the French Quarter and a third in Metairie not long after that. Today, Fleurty Girl is a multi-million-dollar business with nine locations from Mandeville to Baton Rouge to Bay St. Louis.
Still, Haydel never wants to forget her humble beginnings. At some locations, she’s recreated the original porch from her Oak Street home, where Fleurty Girl began. On the front door of each location, she displays the name of the store manager. “That’s their store and they receive a percentage of the sales volume in addition to their base pay,” Haydel said. “They’re the ones who interact with the customer and keep their pulse on the local culture.”
Haydel has also made a point of using her success to help other fledgling businesses. “It started when a woman came into my first shop wanting to sell her candles,” Haydel said. “They were in Saints colors with a label that said, ‘Believe.’ At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted to sell anything but t-shirts.”
Haydel took a chance and those candles quickly sold out. Today, she carries a variety of products from mostly small, woman-owned businesses.
Standing in one spot in her Mandeville store, Haydel can rattle off the businesses she’s supporting and often the name of the owner. “This is Denise Landry with The Parish Line,” she said. “This is Chad and Anna Brown of Oxford Candle Company in Mississippi. This is Simon Hardeveld with Simon of New Orleans Apparel and Celia Isabel with NOLA Tawk out of New Orleans. When I look around the shop, I can see their faces.”
And some of the family members who initially tried to convince her not to take the enormous risk of starting Fleurty Girl now work for her. “My mom is my business manager and my sister works for me,” Haydel said. “None of my kids do. They’re over it.” She laughed.
Inventory has expanded from strictly New Orleans themes to include some American pop culture such as Golden Girls, Dolly Parton, and Taylor Swift. The Mandeville store has some nods to the Northshore and the Bay St. Louis location offers tribute to Mississippi, including a popular “Hancock Parish” shirt (since so many of its residents are ex-pats from Louisiana).
“The funny thing about the Bay St. Louis store is that my husband and I bought a place there to get away and not think about work.” she said. “But once we saw what was happening there, we knew they needed a Fleurty Girl. We even included an AirBnB behind the building with each of the rooms named after an amazing Bay St. Louis woman.”
This commitment to supporting women business owners continues to shape the culture of Haydel’s Fleurty Girl. “At one point, Celia [Isabel] from NOLA Tawk told me to come outside and see the new car our business helped her buy,” she said. “That’s the power of shopping local. The ‘fleurty’ girl is a girl with a lust for life and a love for her city. Whether that’s New Orleans, Baton Rouge, or Bay St. Louis, we want to help her celebrate it.”
