So you happen to be walking up Pike Street in the heart of downtown Covington, just a half-block from Madison Avenue, and you see it. A three-story building shoulder-to-shoulder with all the rest of the ones on the block with the sign BLDG out front.
Well, yeah. It is a building all right. Although on closer inspection, it could be a sporting goods store with all those baseball caps and jerseys on the walls if you peak in the windows.
But as much as they’re unapologetically about baseball here, BLDG is much more than that. A “creative business consultancy” is the proper term for what they do here.
Having done work for clients as diverse as Kroger, Tire Discounters, Christian Moerlein Brewing, New Riff Distilling and the Bipolar Action Network with folks from Massachusetts General, Harvard and Cincinnati Children’s, the BLDG folks aim to “think creatively . . . think possibilities “and make “ordinary the enemy” for their clients.
But there’s a reason they’re the focus of this column. And why all that Florence Y’alls’ stuff is on the walls. They also do sports.
“Are you the guys who make kids cool?” Xavier AD Greg Christopher asked that day he came knocking on their door some years back.
“They were the first,” BLDG founder Jay Becker says of his first sports client from his alma mater. “I had a passion for Xavier basketball,” says Becker, who grew up surrounded by athletes out St. Pius way in Edgewood. BLDG’s “Let’s March” campaign for a Xavier program that coincided with the Muskies’ making the NCAA Tournament almost every year, didn’t hurt its sports credentials.
“That’s how it seems to work,” says Andy Cluxton, BLDG’s director of strategy and communications. The teams they work for seem to do well.
Like the Y’alls, who changed their name from the Florence Freedom to that water tower name and logo that took come convincing when BLDG suggested it to owner David DelBello & Co. “You want us to change our name to a big building that holds water next to I-75?” was the first response when BLDG brought it up.
Nope. “We want you to see it as a Hollywood-type sign where 160,000 cars go by every day,” was the case they made, Cluxton said. Big-time national guys like Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy, who called it “the greatest name in minor league baseball history” agreed. And there was the call from the Wall Street Journal asking about how it came to be.
“Change is tough. That’s why people call us,” said Cluxton, a Dayton, Ohio, guy and Ohio U. journalism grad. And like Becker, a big sports guy.
“We all have this passion for baseball,” Cluxton says. And as much as they’d like to work for the Reds, the minor leagues is where it’s at. Where all the ideas that make it up to the Major Leagues get their start.
Where it’s about “inexpensive family entertainment” like nowhere else these days. And where, when you get it right the way the Y’alls have as an expression of the history and culture of Northern Kentucky, you get people calling you.
“Georgia Tech called us when they saw our Xavier work,” Becker says of the company he helped found in 2012. And why when the Y’alls’ owners bought a second Frontier League franchise, the Windy City Thunderbolts in Crestwood, Illinois, just south of Chicago in an industrial neighborhood best known for its power lines, the theme is everywhere in the BLDG branding.
“We were very much ahead of the game,” Becker says if you go to a Y’alls’ game and realize at least a third of the crowd is on the move at any time in the game, heading to the Kids’ Zone and all the inflatable fun out there or the General Store, a replica of the Rabbit Hash General Store, to buy Y’alls’ jerseys and merchandise. And maybe wearing one of those bright red “Caintuckee” jerseys in honor of the restaurant of that name that sat at the corner of Dixie Highway and 127 in the middle of town.
BLDG didn’t just work to change the brand here, they aimed “to change the culture,” Becker says as they move on to their next big challenge – rebranding and redirecting the historic Frontier League, an 18-team monster from Quebec in French Canada to the Mississippi delta, from way up East in metropolitan areas of Boston and New York/New Jersey to Pittsburgh all the way back through the Midwest’s metro areas of St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland and Greater Cincinnati.
Starting next season as the re-branded National Association of Professional Baseball (NAPB}, the new look and the new logo along with the name will make its national debut here in Northern Kentucky in a July “Y’alls’ Star Week” three-day festival that will open with a big reception at the Newport Car Barn Monday, July 13, followed by Mascot Mania and the Home Run Derby, July 14, and the Y’all Star Game, July 15.
“We’ve got it all ready to go,” Cluxton says of the work BLDG has done to make it happen. Which gets us to the second meaning of the name – “building.”
Not just a place, they say, not just a bricks-and-mortar deal but it’s what the BLDG folks do – “building” brands and cultures with creative problem-solving unafraid to ask the right questions and then change.
The way Becker has, as he’s evolved from a commodities trader in Chicago to a breeder of racehorses down in Paris to back home here in Northern Kentucky helping businesses find out who they are. And what to do about that.
Which certainly worked for the Y’alls last year in a historically bad season when they never got above .500 but still drew 110,021 fans in 47 games (an average of 2,341, not quite 50 percent capacity in the 4,500-seat Thomas More Stadium.
Compare that to the Barrels, who don’t publicize attendance figures in accord with Arena Football One policy, but probably haven’t reached the 1,000 average mark in four games at NKU’s 9,000-seat Truist Arena.
But NKU and Thomas More do keep attendance for their men’s and women’s basketball teams and for a combined 60 games this past season, the four programs drew 65,939 fans – an average of 1,099.
Might not be a bad thought for the Barrels, with a terrific product to sell, to give BLDG a call. And maybe for the NKU Athletic Department with a big arena to fill, or even NKU’s Horizon League, with teams in lots of the same cities as the Frontier League.
They’re Northern Kentucky’s home team with a wide reach.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.