Reel People: Meet some of the New Orleanians using social media to support the city's culture

Section about Chris Olsen:

One of the best parts of the internet is that sometimes going viral and finding yourself with an influential online platform can catch even professionals off guard.

You don’t have to look any further than Royal Street in the French Quarter to see it. Over the last year, Chris Olsen has become one of the most influential online voices in the Quarter, where he owns two small businesses, lives and is raising children with his wife Megan.

Olsen walked away from the online work world, where he’d been a digital marketing professional, during the COVID-19 pandemic. He pivoted to the past with Megan, who worked through much of the pandemic as an assistant vice president of nursing at Ochsner’s West Bank campus, opening first Swamp Rags and then Vice & Graft, two vintage clothing shops in the Quarter.

Olsen only really used his social media skills to support this business — until last year when the city announced it was closing the only school in the Quarter, Homer Plessy, where his kids were students.

Olsen posted a video about the move and the negative consequences closing the school would have. The video got a fair amount of attention — and significantly more than Olsen had expected.

It was then he realized “Oh, we can actually do something and get some community support” using the platform, Olsen says. He wanted to "use the platform I have to do something good,” he says.

In the months since, he's built a substantial online following in the city. He’s weighed in on a “cascade” of issues, ranging from the Super Bowl and rising French Quarter rents to the Bubble Kerfuffle and potential closures of The Dungeon and Mona Lisa.

His first truly viral video came when the Motwani family — one of the most influential families in the city that owns huge swaths of the Quarter — trashed the iconic Tujague’s sign. The video got a lot traction, including the attention of local and national media, and Olsen began building off the style and momentum to highlight the difficulties small businesses in the Quarter are facing.

Since then, he’s had a number of French Quarter-centric videos go viral, including pieces on the collapse of St. Louis Street’s businesses and a post breaking the news that The Dungeon was changing hands, which got more than 4 million views in less than 24 hours.

“I finally figured out what kind of video content I was comfortable with and kind of cracked what would work,” Olsen says.