A few dozen business leaders, retailers and city and parish officials gathered Wednesday for a “community conversation” about the results of a retail study of New Iberia and surrounding communities.

The Buxton Co. utilized psychographics — the lifestyle, purchase behavior and media habits of more than 50,000 residents in the city and surrounding area — to produce the most comprehensive retail study ever completed here, said Iberia Industrial Develop-ment Foundation President and CEO Mike Tarantino.

The study ultimately identified 150 retailers out of more than 5,000 that Buxton thought could be a good fit for the community. Out of those 150, Tarantino and New Iberia Mayor Hilda Curry narrowed the list to a core group of 15 retailers to initially pursue.

Iberia Industrial Foundation President and CEO Mike Tarantino, left, speaks Wednesday during a presentation on the Buxton report, an-in-depth look at 50,000 residents' retail spending habits. HOLLY LELEUX-THUBRON / THE DAILY IBERIAN Advertisement

The study identified retail leakage, which is how many consumer dollars are currently leaving the area and being spent elsewhere. The studied also identified how many people from the outlying areas come to New Iberia to shop and eat and identified any oversaturation that currently exists in the local retail market.

It was commissioned late last year by the city and IDF and the results have been available to the community since April.

Chip Rodgers, a senior vice-president with Bux-ton, traveled here Wednesday from the company’s Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters to facilitate the “community conversation.”

He briefly ex-plained some of the results to those in attendance, adding now that the community has this information in hand, it is time it identifies a “vision.”

“We need to begin to talk about how we are going to prepare ourselves for future growth,” Tarantino said. “My hope is in the near future we can get the proper groups of people together — Realtors, developers, merchants and local business people to make things happen with this information.”

He emphasized the need and ability to use the Buxton findings not only to attract new retail opportunity but also to help existing merchants capture more retail dollars and to identify possible franchising opportunities that could be successful here based on retail leakage data.

Rodgers said the New Iberia area can be made more “retail-friendly” by pre-assembling or preparing sites for development, expanding infrastructure, streamlining the permitting and zoning process, providing incentives to lure new retailers and offering more opportunities for existing local merchants.

“We want to make sure the entire local market is healthy,” Rodgers said. “Not necessarily attract competition.”

Tarantino said his staff is currently building relationships with the core 15 retailers who were the first group to be sent customized marketing materials designed to show them why New Iberia would be a good fit.

He said they will continue exploring leads and relationships with many more of the 150 identified retailers in the coming months.

A Web-based application called SCOUT, which includes all the Buxton data on the area, will be made available for public viewing soon, Tarantino said.