36 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019
RUSTY WILLIAMSTorrie Savage poses
in front of a moss art
installation at Hygge
Coworking (below
and opposite).THE GOOD LIFE
STYLEThe
Savage
Way
Torrie Savage takes
guerilla marketing to
the streets
BY LAURIE PRINCEWHEN THE ACC BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT came to
Charlotte in March, thousands of uptown visitors walked on
basketballs.
Not real ones, but sidewalk images pressure-washed onto
dirty cement. The Atlantic Coast Conference hired The
Savage Way to create four designs of basketballs, mascots,
and a hashtag, providing fans with one more reason to get
on social media. The technique, which is temporary and
legal, involves placing a stencil on the sidewalk and spraying
the cutout spaces with pressurized water. When the stencil is
li
ed o, the clean area is the design and the dirty area is the
background.
Who knew the sidewalks were so grimy?
Torrie Savage did.
One day, while pressure-washing her dad’s sidewalk, she
began blasting ower designs on the dirty cement with the
hose. Excited, she researched the concept and found it was
popular in Europe, o
en called “reverse” or “green” grati.
“We laugh looking back,” Savage says, referring to her busi-
ness partner, Paula Bartlett, who joined her shortly a
er she
launched her advertising company in 2012. “We were going
to call it Aqua Ads, but we didn’t want it to be so much about
ads,” she says. She came up with “clean grati” and sold
OrthoCarolina on the idea. The company has remained a
client ever since.
Savage and Bartlett have been hired to run campaigns in
other cities, too, including Portland, to promote the city’s
public transit system, and New York, to announce the open-
ing of Clarks’ shoe store in Soho. Local work is booming, with
contracts that range from the Carolina Panthers to the Dowd
YMCA. Their clever designs make clients and their patrons
smile. An ad for a local coee shop, designed by Matt Hooker,
shows a latte with “Love People” written in the foam. On the
cup’s side is the company’s logo, Not Just Coee.