When Winter Storm Uri Hit, These Five Brands Didn’t Wait for a Marketing Plan

Texas has weathered hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts. In 2021, it added an arctic deep freeze. For the first time, the National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings across the entire state. Winter Storm Uri wrecked the electric grid, burst pipes, closed roads, and put public wellbeing at risk.

Some businesses made a real difference in their communities that week. Others missed the mark. The difference was authenticity: a commitment to being helpful that existed before the crisis.

Five brands earned a lasting boost to their reputation. None of them started from zero.

H-E-B has run on “Texans helping Texans” for years, and the tagline held up under real pressure. The San Antonio-based chain gave customers timely, straightforward updates on supply chains and store status throughout the storm. At one location, a power outage took down the registers. Employees let shoppers leave without paying for their groceries. H-E-B used its logistics strength to keep shelves stocked when it mattered most. Texans still thank the chain on social media for how it handled the crisis.

CenterPoint Energy, the Houston-based electric and gas provider, gave customers frequent, plain-language updates during the storm: outage trackers, safety guides for damaged pipes. Once the worst passed, CenterPoint shifted to recovery messaging, warning customers about scams, sharing recovery resources, and committing $1 million to a recovery fund with the City of Houston. Next to ERCOT’s lack of transparency, the contrast was hard to miss.

Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale used his personal brand the way he always has: to show up for Houston. He opened Gallery Furniture stores as warming centers during the outages, the same move he’s made during past hurricanes, then partnered with the Houston Food Bank to distribute food once the roads cleared. The consistency is the point. Mack and Gallery Furniture have built a loyal following on repeated sincerity.

Illuminidol, the Austin candle company known for its celebrity prayer candles, had something people needed when the power went out: light. Owner Gavin Inverso delivered more than 2,000 candles to Austinites without heat or electricity. Illuminidol already gives 10% of proceeds from every order to charity. That standing commitment is what made a fast, credible response possible. There was no new program to stand up.

Cotton Holdings, the Houston-based disaster recovery company, mobilized as soon as it had power back. It partnered with restaurants in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas to serve hundreds of free hot meals to people hit hardest by the cold.

None of these five started building relationships during the storm. They’d already built them. A crisis doesn’t create trust. It tests whether the trust was real to begin with. The brands that passed were the ones already serving their communities long before the temperature dropped.

That’s the lesson worth keeping past this one storm: reputation earned in a crisis is reputation you’d already earned. The crisis just made it visible.