Three Thanksgivings in, we're pointing this one back at the four blocks that started it. Not the nationwide team, not the growth chart, just Retro Row, East Village, and the specific people who taught us how to build here. This is that thank-you, said the way we'd say it across a table.
Three years in, this city still writes the story
Three Thanksgivings ago, we thanked the neighbors who backed an untested haus with no track record to point to. Last year we thanked a team that had grown clear across the country, six states and counting, while insisting Long Beach was still the return address on everything we sent. This year, three years into building here, we’re doing something we haven’t done since that first letter. We’re turning the whole piece back toward home. No nationwide angle. No growth chart. Just the city.
We work out of a building a few blocks off Fourth Street, close enough that Retro Row’s storefronts end up in half our location photography whether we plan it or not. East Village’s monthly art walk still shuts our block down on a Saturday night, foot traffic spilling past our windows toward the galleries and the record shop and the guy who sets up a folding table of vinyl on the corner rain or shine. The taco stand at Fourth and Junipero has fed more client meetings than any conference room we’ve ever booked. Three years hasn’t made any of that fade into background noise. If anything, it’s gotten louder, because three Thanksgivings gives you enough distance to notice how much of what HAUS XXIV is came directly from where HAUS XXIV is.
We didn’t move to Long Beach to build a brand. We started here, and the city built half of it for us. The port grit, the independent storefronts that refuse to look like every other strip mall in Southern California, the neighborhood that’s spent decades getting overlooked by anyone driving through on their way to somewhere shinier. That’s not a coincidence with a haus built on Where the Defiant Reign™. That’s the blueprint, sitting a five-minute walk from our front door the entire time.
“"People ask why we never talked about leaving Long Beach once the team went nationwide. The honest answer is that this city already believed in overlooked before we put it in a tagline. We didn’t bring defiance here. We found it, on Fourth Street, and built a haus around it."”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
The Retro Row and East Village partners who taught us how to build
Gratitude gets soft when it stays general, so here’s the specific version. The independent bookstore two doors down hosted our first public event outside a client’s walls, a small evening talk on branding for small businesses, no charge to attend, coffee and cookies from the bakery next door. We expected a dozen people. Forty showed up, half of them small business owners from Retro Row who’d never once thought about their brand as anything more than a logo on a sign. That night changed how we talk about branding to this day. It’s not decoration. It’s the reason a shopper picks your storefront over the one next to it.
We’re thankful for the family-run print shop on Anaheim Street that has rush-printed more last-minute proofs for us than we’d like to admit, always with the same answer when we apologize for the short notice: "That’s what neighbors are for." We’re thankful for the vintage furniture shop that let us shoot an entire campaign inside its front room on a slow Tuesday, no fee, just a request that we tag them and send flowers after, which we did both. We’re thankful for the East Village Association, who brought us in to help redesign the banners and signage for their annual art walk, a project with a community nonprofit’s budget and an ask we treated like it belonged to a client ten times the size. The banners still line Linden Avenue every first Saturday.
None of these are hypothetical favors we’re describing from a distance. These are people we still walk past on the way to lunch, people who know our dogs’ names, people who’ve watched this haus go from three folding chairs and a shared laptop to a nationwide team that still keeps its front door on Fourth Street. That kind of gratitude doesn’t fit in a caption. It fits in showing up again the next time they need something, which is the only kind of thanks that actually counts.
“"HAUS redesigned our art walk banners like they were pitching a Fortune 500 rebrand, not a neighborhood nonprofit with a shoestring budget. That’s not something you get from an agency. That’s something you get from neighbors who happen to be good at this."”
Board Member, East Village Association, HAUS XXIV community partner
The city we keep building for
Long Beach never asked to be a case study in what a market overlooks. It just kept being itself: a port city with more grit than gloss, a downtown that’s spent years rebuilding its own reputation one independent storefront at a time, a community that shows up for its neighbors before anyone asks it to. We didn’t invent the idea that the overlooked deserve the same craft as anyone with a bigger budget. We watched this city practice it for three years before we ever wrote it down as a promise to our clients.
That’s what we’re carrying into year four. Not a bigger office, though the team has room to grow. Not a louder brand, though we’ll keep raising the standard on every project that comes through the door. Just the same four blocks, the same neighbors, the same conviction that a haus can go nationwide and still know exactly which sidewalk it started on. Long Beach didn’t have to keep making room for us. It did anyway, one bookstore reading, one rush print job, one banner-lined art walk at a time. We’re not taking a single block of it for granted.
