Garrett Heath loves San Antonio. He loves eating at mom-and-pop Mexican joints. He loves Spurs culture. And he loves loves loves Fiesta and its most visible symbol, the medal.
Born in Amarillo and raised largely in Lubbock, Heath moved to San Antonio in 2005 after earning a degree in industrial engineering. He was immediately smitten. While working at Rackspace, he launched a blog called SA Flavor in 2009 as a love letter to the city’s unique cultures, writing mostly about food and drink, but also local artists, shops and trends that caught his eye.
He started collecting Fiesta medals in 2014, the year his daughter was born, and made his first SA Flavor medal the following year. SA Flavor morphed from blog to online retail space, as he sold medals, T-shirts, hats and other San Antonio-related ephemera.
Since then, medals — designing them, having them manufactured, selling them and trading them — has become the most time consuming part of his business. He collaborates with artists and other medal heads, often creating viral medals that riff on aspects of San Antonio culture, like the Ghost Tracks, chicken on a stick, and this year, a Wemby medal that looks like the Wendy’s Old Fashioned restaurant logo. Nationwide and global trends are also fair game, with medals that celebrate everything from Taylor Swift to the Golden Girls.
On Tuesday, SA Flavor released a “Luis Vaton” medal designed by artist Andy Benavides, based on the South Side art installation Benavides created — and then updated — earlier this year.
Now, with a new brick-and-mortar store in the Strand at Heubner Oaks shopping center, Heath sells medals — his own plus those designed by others — along with Fiesta- and San Antonio-related accessories, including T-shirts, hats and magnets.
His iconic chicken on a stick image, for example, can now be found on all kinds of merch. The store also carries items from local companies like BarbacoApparel, Arte Mia and Chica Beauty, as well as a handful of items from Mexico.
A playable medal
Heath’s online presence still drives much of his business.
A longtime content marketer who has fine-tuned his efforts over the years, Heath uses organic search, social media and text alerts to get the word out to a core group of medal enthusiasts who will drop everything to score one of his limited edition medals.
“He sends a text and I come running,” said Laurie Zapata, a self-described “medal maniac” who was in the shop recently to pick up more 2024 medals. “I think I have two or three orders,” she said, laughing.
She pointed out some of the medals she’d already bought this year: four of the Golden Girls, two “My Fiesta Era,” two elotes, two queso flameados — and for her sons, Heath’s pièce de résistance: Fiesta Boy, a medal that is also a playable game.
Heath worked with one of his longtime collaborators, Tony Infante, to design the playable medal. The pair have created several of what they call 8-bit medals, which come with QR codes on the back to play games they created, like Taco Mario and Taco Donkey Kong.
“But it’s not really a playable medal, is it?” Heath asks. “Because you have to scan a QR code. This year’s medal is actually playable.” He pulls out a medal in the shape of a game console. In the center, a square cartridge can be pulled out and slotted into any Game Boy.
In Medal Madness, a character named Lit must collect all the hottest SA Flavor medals.
Set to a soundtrack Heath commissioned that mimics the beeping of an old-school game, Lit must dodge downtown construction, rain clouds and the ducks at Woodlawn Lake to get medals.
That medal runs $45, while the QR code version is $12 — the typical cost of most SA Flavor medals. Like all of the medals Heath produces, a portion of the proceeds will go to charity — in this case, $4 per medal to Extra Life, a collective of gamers who raise money to support CHRISTUS Children’s Foundation.
“They went fast, so I reordered them,” he said from the tiny and overflowing storeroom behind his shop.
Fiesta Medal Maniacs
Heath credits the creation of the Fiesta Medal Maniacs Facebook page in 2015 with helping get his medals on the map.
“One night I sold a kajillion medals, and I was like, what is this?” he said. “And I was able to backtrack it and I learned about the Fiesta Medal Maniacs.”
Now he’s part of that tight-knit community.
This year he made a limited edition “Meet me at the Crossroads” medal to celebrate the longtime gathering spot outside the Target at Crossroads Mall where medal maniacs go to trade and sell. He texted to his subscribers and posted on Facebook that he’d be there for 45 minutes, giving away one free medal per person “Or trade a six pack of Mexican or IPA beer for 3 medals!”
Zapata, who had just left Crossroads, turned her car around and went back for the medal. Heath gave away 150 of them over 45 minutes, scoring two six-packs and a tallboy.
SA Flavor’s medals often flirt with copyrighted or trademarked products, like Big Red soda, the Spurs coyote and the North Star Mall cowboy boots. The maker of those boots, artist Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, called him up one day and they had a chat about derivative works.
Heath recounted the experience in a blog post after Wade passed in late 2019. He said Fiesta medals are “kind of a remix culture,” but acknowledged that he does sometimes pay licensing fees.
Heath tries to attend most Fiesta events, his frenetic energy matching that of other hardcore Fiesta fans. At this year’s Pin Pandemonium event, Heath wore a massive custom Fiesta hat and got so overheated that he went to a nearby clinic and was given two liters of fluid via IV — and then he went back.
Curating the shop
Inside his store just a few days before Fiesta got underway, Heath credited Veronica Peña, his one full-time staffer, for making the store the success it has become. Peña used to run the Fiesta Commission’s retail shop; but when the commission closed it in 2021 and laid Peña off, Heath, who somehow still keeps a day job doing marketing for various clients, leapt at the chance to hire her.
Peña, who had just moved from Laredo when she started at the commission, fell in love with the lore of Fiesta, how it draws the community together and benefits local nonprofits. Her first contact with Heath was through his Ghost Tracks medal.
“My phone was ringing off the hook with people looking for this medal,” she said. “It was so overwhelming I remember getting in a bad mood and being like, ‘Who is this SA Flavor?'”
Eventually, she met Heath and began stocking his medals in the store. When he was laid off from Rackspace, he even worked in the store for a while.
Peña helmed SA Flavor’s first store, on Zarzamora and Woodlawn streets. He learned the basic lesson of real estate — location, location, location — the hard way. The store got no foot traffic, just folks who followed him online.
The new store gets great foot traffic, he said. Heath praised the walkable design as well as his commercial neighbors, which include a yoga studio next door — that’s how he met the owner of Hippie Glass, who would become a vendor — Half Price Books, Snooze A.M. Eatery and the Flying Saucer bar, among many others.
He credits Peña for helping him understand he doesn’t always need to order 500 of a thing. Sometimes, just five will do.
Peña says she curates the shop so that people will find something unique, “not something they can find all over San Antonio,” or at large retailers like Walmart or Amazon. “And, if someone comes back in, I want them to see different things.”
Heath said the experience of running a store and hiring people has been humbling. In addition to Peña, he employs several part-time workers, who run the store, mail medals and write the SA Flavor newsletter, which he said has been “super important” for awareness and sales.
“I have mad respect” for other local retailers, he said.
