Downtown business owners try to keep smiling amid pandemic - 1736 Magazine, Summer 2020

Penelope Ballas-Stewart, who manages the family-owned Luigi’s restaurant, has had the Italian and Greek eatery closed since late March. The 70-year-old
business owns its building, so it doesn’t have the overhead that many other downtown businesses have.
FACES OF DOWNTOWN
Sean Mooney
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown
that a little bit of effort can go a
long way toward helping those in
need. Sean Mooney and his fellow employees
and the branding and merchandise
company, Showpony, is a prime example.
They raised more than $70,000 for cashstrapped
downtown businesses whose
revenues dried up overnight when the state
declared emergency measures in late March.
And all it took was a T-shirt campaign:
#WeGiveAShirt.
The shirts, designed by Showpony and
sister company on Broad Street, Wier/
Stewart, sold close to 7,000 of the $20 shirts.
Half the revenue was donated to businesses
and half was used to cover production costs.
“When the official restrictions came down,
we were really concerned about a lot of the
local businesses that we have as clients, as
well as other local businesses and how they
were affected,” Mooney said. “We tried to
think of a way in which we could help them.”
The company makes and sells a lot of
Sean Mooney of
Showpony models
a shirt designed
for Fat Man’s
as part of the
#WeGiveAShirt
fundraising
initiative.
[FILE/THE AUGUSTA
CHRONICLE]
T-shirts anyway, so it was glad to lend a
helping hand to support its fellow downtown
merchants.
“We launched with seven shirts, and the
response from the community was really
solid. More and more businesses asked us to
be a part of it,” Mooney said.
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