On a picture-perfect spring afternoon in St. Louis, our RDI Heartland Chapter gathered at the Rawlings Experience for a Project Walk that felt equal parts ballgame, brand immersion, and community hang. Our exclusive "Heartland Fan" koozies celebrate the colors of sports teams throughout our region. We kicked things off outside with a tailgate-style happy hour, sun out, drinks in hand, and our limited-edition “Heartland Fan” koozies making their debut like a proper giveaway day at the...

There's something sport does that almost nothing else can. Not any particular team, not any single season, but sport itself, as a kind of shared human practice. The way it creates identity out of thin air. A couple colors, a name, and a ritual repeated across generations.... and suddenly a group of strangers has something in common that feels anything but arbitrary. It feels, somehow, innately kindred. And maybe that’s why it’s been on my mind lately—because in a time when so much feels...

Last Thursday, our chapter hosted our inaugural Retail Talk —and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Going into the final week of planning the conversation, I still wasn’t entirely sure what it was going to be. I'd just gotten back home from a fun but chaotic trip to Seattle, was more depleted than I wanted to admit, and found myself in a familiar place a few hours before we went live: staring blankly at my screen, questioning if I actually had anything worthwhile to say. But then… we...