We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stephanie Khattak a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Stephanie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

K.Co Arts is an arts-centered travel content and engagement consultancy, and K.Co Press is its publishing initiative. I founded K.Co Arts in 2016, and it has since evolved to include James Khattak as a co-founder and principal photographer. We have a small roster of preferred vendors who are integral to all of our work.

The stories that drive our mission are shared through travel in cities of all sizes, and engaging with unique arts and cultural communities who have their own stories to tell.

During our first year on the road, we visited a town shaped by a salt mine (Grand Saline), happened upon a foot-tapping historic music festival (The Old Fiddlers Reunion in Athens), saw work from a world-class creative residency in Corsicana and had the best-ever fried pies in Mineola. Those represent just a small selection of places that made it into our first book! Not only were each of these towns in our home state of Texas, they were all within two hours of our front door. We were familiar with some, but many were simple chance encounters. These were delightful experiences that we are motivated to share, and communities that we want to support. We hope that by inspiring these connections, we can be good advocates for creative economies, independent businesses and local arts communities.

Stephanie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Covid-19 forced us to shutter our in-person tours and engagements, and also kept us at home or close to it for a very long time. Road trips to small towns — taken in a day or less — got us out of the house in a way that fit the public safety criteria at the time. James always took his camera, and captured many interesting architectural, public art and landscape scenes along the way. Once public safety policies began to relax, we were able to patronize local and independent shops, restaurants and art centers, which was when the real fun began!

In response to interest and conversations from our friends and professional peers, we looked for opportunities to leverage our expertise in smaller town destinations and off-the-path travel to benefit our existing community and integrate new ideas into our business.

With so many photographs, observations and helpful information collected from our journeys, and with our significant professional experience in editorial and publishing operations, we chose to publish coffee table books based on our road trips and other travel. Each book features curated, achievable, actionable and inspirational content illustrated with fine art photography, designed to include special touches that make it a beautiful and useful gift or decor item.

In 2022, we published three books: “Ten Texas Towns And Places In-Between, Field Notes From The Back Roads,” “Sunwashed” and “Howdy, Neighbor!”. More books are planned for 2023 and beyond. We also work with hospitality, tourism and travel media clients to produce custom destination guides, along with a small selection of other related content and publishing projects.

We offer our books direct to consumers through our website or direct outreach, and in bulk to hotels, vacation rentals, real estate professionals, corporate gift buyers and others whose clientele would love a truly unique travel and destination gift.

Some of our books have light customization options for eligible business clientele, and we plan to add fully custom travel and destination books to our service line later in 2023.

Our books introduce readers to new places and experiences, and offer a fresh perspective on places that readers already know, love or would like to learn more about.

For our clients, we are unique in our ability to conduct detailed research, engage our network and resources, and sort through vast amounts of information to craft engaging, concise narratives, fresh recommendations and unique experiences to serve a specific customer, creative vision or brand perspective.

We are a small team of two founders and a contracted editor, so we are very thoughtful in choosing the projects that we pursue and the services we offer. We are focused on and intimately involved with each publication or client engagement. Our process and culture builds trust and ensures cohesiveness, appropriate context and authenticity across the books that we publish and the projects we deliver.

Readers tell us that our books are enjoyed by homesick former Texans, and also that they are inspired to visit these towns after learning about them. We love to hear both of these comments! They reflect success in capturing and sharing a strong sense of place, and inspiring others to expand their own travel horizons by “adventuring” closer to home.

Clients say that we do a great job connecting their audience to local businesses that are relevant and often new to them. This type of “in the know” guide builds trust and exclusivity for travel and hospitality brands who want to be an expert resource, directing guests to local restaurants, shopping and art experiences that are unique and special.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Our final book of 2022 was “Howdy, Neighbor!”, a 117-page collection of photos, observations and information covering Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas, with a “Howdy from here!” look toward the mountains of Juarez, Mexico from an El Paso rooftop.

We visited 92 destinations in 2022, and 20 of those were for a single itinerary in “Howdy, Neighbor!” a long drive from our home in Dallas to the Rio Grande in South Texas, from Old Mesilla, New Mexico north to Albuquerque, and back east along parts of Route 66 in New Mexico and Texas.

This trip was scheduled at the end of August, and we planned to publish by November. So, we were already cutting it close.

Then, it started to rain and rain and rain! Our carefully planned trip coincided with the far West Texas and New Mexico monsoon season, a phenomenon we were not familiar with until about a week before our departure date.

There was no other time to take this trip, and its photos and content were an editorial pillar of our book. Due to the specific journey — Rio Grande to Route 66 — there was really no substitute for the landscape, local culture and art to cover in that region.

We were frequent users of the weather apps — most of them, plus a few local weather Twitter accounts — in an attempt to get the most accurate forecast in real time. We committed to put safety first.

Sticking to an editorial framework and basic photography plan that ensured we got what we — and our readers — needed, we let go of the details and simply did our best within what we could accomplish each day.

We easily made it through the first three days of a five day trip, albeit with a few overcast photos and inconvenient rain showers. Then, just as we were about to leave the New Mexico monsoons, a new heavy storm system appeared, moving in from the eastern U.S. and across north and central Texas.

On day four, all of our weather intel said the same thing: Essentially, “Head home now, or stay in New Mexico indefinitely.” We left early the next morning, canceling hotels and pet sitter bookings and abandoning the entire last portion of our trip, a significant stretch through Southwestern Oklahoma. We put pedal to metal to make it back to Dallas.

Other than a few quick stops along Route 66, we drove straight from Albuquerque to Dallas in about 12 hours. Dallas started to flood at approximately the same time we locked our front door behind us and greeted our cats. We were lucky.

We love our job, but it is still a job, complete with unexpected challenges, expectations to meet and the need for resilience. This particular example features one of life’s few truly uncontrollable things — the weather. There was no changing it and we couldn’t give up, so we had to find a way to control our outcome within it and deliver for our readers. It also helped to spend some time ahead of the trip deciding what criteria would activate our bad weather contingency plans before we were actually in a weather emergency.

Rio Grande to Route 66 is one of the most popular sections in “Howdy, Neighbor!” and one of our all-time favorite trips.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

We work very hard to build trust, be reliable and to keep things fun! Not only in how we interact with each other, our team and our vendors, but also in how we approach the work that we do and our creative and editorial style. We find a lot of joy in our journeys and if we consistently communicate that well and inspire others, then everyone benefits.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kcoarts.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kcopress/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KCOARTS/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/k-co/?viewAsMember=true

Image Credits
Photos by James Khattak.