The 50-year-old North San Antonio Chamber of Commerce has dropped the geographic signifier in its name to better reflect its aspirations to represent businesses across the region.
The newly-christened Metro SA Chamber has also kicked “of Commerce” to the curb in its rebrand, becoming part of a trend of chambers attempting to modernize both their brands and their value proposition to potential member businesses.
The name change and new logo were announced Thursday evening at a “Rebrand Reveal” member event at the chamber’s headquarters off Wurzbach Parkway.
President and CEO Brett Finley, who is marking a year leading the chamber this month, chatted with the San Antonio Report about the new moniker ahead of Thursday’s event.
The North Chamber has long wanted to rebrand to better reflect that it represents businesses across San Antonio, he said, and would likely have done so much earlier if the pandemic hadn’t disrupted business as usual.
“Our membership spans all four county precincts and all 10 city council districts — and beyond,” he said. That reality “really just didn’t match up with the name,” he said.
“There’s no territorial jurisdiction for becoming a part of our organization, just as there’s no jurisdiction for the activities that we like to do or when we’re advocating for our businesses.”
The rebrand will come with a website refresh, which will be complete next month. The chamber’s new logo leaves the old gold and black color scheme behind in favor of blue lettering; the letters “SA” are embedded in the “o” in Metro, which is surrounded by a red circle with points implying a compass. “Chamber” is in slender black capital letters below.
The Metro SA Chamber refresh follows the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s refresh in 2023, when it re-added the “Greater” it had dropped in 2012 back into its name. It de-emphasized, but did not completely drop, the word commerce.
That same year, the Greater Chamber made overtures to the North Chamber about merging, after 80% of its membership agreed that San Antonio is home to too many chambers — at least 10 in the city, plus those representing surrounding municipalities like Alamo Heights and New Braunfels.
The timing seemed right; neither chamber had a permanent CEO, as the North Chamber’s Cristina Aldrete and San Antonio Chamber’s Richard Perez had both stepped down in late 2022.
But the effort ultimately failed. The North Chamber’s board chairman at the time said they felt like the two organizations had different constituencies.
Late last year, the Greater Chamber named Jeff Webster to head up that organization, while the North Chamber tapped Finley. In March, the third of the big three, The San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, named Luis Rodriguez to helm the nation’s oldest Hispanic chamber after Marina Gonzalez stepped down in July 2023.
And so San Antonio remains a city chock full of chambers, each trying to elucidate their value propositions to the city’s tens of thousands of businesses, large and small.
Finley has spent a good deal of time thinking about new ways to support businesses beyond the membership/events/sponsorship model, while still growing the organization, which has remained at about 900 members for at least the past year.
“Organizations like ours are going to have to be willing to … be flexible and really try to look at things like non-dues revenue, and not just be solely restricted to membership and events,” he said.