Outside's oral history of Melanzana opens in a hardware store in Portland, Oregon, where the writer spots a stranger's hoodie from across the garden center: micro-grid fleece, sleeves a different color from the body, drawcord hood. For most of the brand's 30 years, that hoodie meant its owner had been to Leadville, Colorado. You couldn't get one anywhere else.
Plenty of small towns have something like it, made in one place by people who'd rather make it well than make more of it. Savvy tourism offices are starting to treat these as a reason to plan a whole trip, and they're right to. Here are four we'd plan one around.
Fritz Howard started Melanzana in 1994 with a friend and some Polartec remnants, and spent its first two winters living in a tipi he'd sewn himself. They first called the company Eggplant, the least outdoor-brand name they could think of, until a trademark conflict pushed them to the Italian word. He picked Leadville, a former silver mining town of 2,633, because it didn't have the ostentation of a ski resort.
Most of the shop at 716 Harrison Avenue is now appointment-only, and a lot of shoppers assume that's a scarcity play. The people who've been around longest say otherwise. Before appointments, a hundred people would be lined up at 8 a.m. to clear the shelves and flip everything on eBay, and a team sewing by hand couldn't keep up. Lake County's tourism director, Adam Ducharme, told Outside that people "don't just come to Melanzana to buy a fleece. They're coming because they want to experience a place that feels real."
Melanzana is slowly going back to selling online, with help from a second sewing shop it opened in Alamosa in 2024. That's good news for everyone on the waitlist, and probably for Leadville too, since every hoodie spotted in a Portland garden center still points back to Harrison Avenue.
Russian River pours Pliny the Younger for two weeks a year at its pubs in Santa Rosa and Windsor, eight miles apart. It doesn't distribute bottles and says it has no "intention of ever selling them online again." A Sonoma County Economic Development Board study, published by the brewery, found the 2022 release brought $6.1 million into the county, up 20 percent from 2020, with visitors from 42 states and five countries. That's two weeks of one beer.
Tree House started in Brimfield, Massachusetts, in 2011 and has never sold its beer through a distributor. You buy it where it's made, at the brewery in Charlton or at one of its own taprooms in Massachusetts, Connecticut and upstate New York. Co-founder Dean Rohan explained the thinking to New England Public Media in 2017: "The further away your beer gets, the less it gets treated well." At the time, the wait in line ran anywhere from ten minutes to over an hour, and people traveled a long way to stand in it.
Lisbon is full of custard tarts. The ones called Pastéis de Belém come from one bakery next to the Jerónimos Monastery, which has made them since 1837 from the monastery's old "secret recipe," known only to the master confectioners who make them by hand in what the bakery calls the "secret room." The name is trademarked, so anywhere else in town you're ordering a pastel de nata.
None of these started as a tourism campaign. They're businesses that grew slowly and stayed where they started, and people plan trips around them anyway. Most towns have one. If yours does, make it part of the pitch, because it's often the thing a visitor remembers and the reason they tell a friend to go.
