Photo courtesy of Theresa Manry.
South Boutique
The new Lee Branch location of South Boutique is planned to look similar to the Trussville one, shown here, but with more square footage. Photo courtesy of Theresa Manry.
When Anna Spruiell opened South Boutique in Trussville in 2013, she just wanted to be able to survive and pay bills. She had no idea she would be successful enough to open her second location in Lee Branch this fall.
After graduating from the University of Alabama in 2009, Spruiell moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where she worked in a boutique for three years. She came close to buying it but decided to move back home. Her parents tried to get her to go back to school, but she had different plans.
“I knew I could run a store and enjoyed it, but I wanted to do it on my own, and not work for someone else,” said Spruiell, now 28. “I decided to open South in Trussville because of new construction going up and there were not many stores in that area.
When choosing a name, Spruiell was looking for a name that would tell her story. After doing the research, she couldn’t believe the name South wasn’t already taken.
“I was born and raised in [the] South, lived in South Carolina. I just put ‘Boutique’ on it so people will know what we are,” she said.
Others in the industry told her that boutiques aren’t very profitable in their first year, if ever. However, that wasn’t the case with South.
“Within the first month, I had paid back everything I had taken out and already made a profit,” she said.
Once the store was up and running, Spruiell used Instagram to showcase their inventory. Spruiell largely credits social media for the success of her business in the first year.
“It was a surprise, to be honest,” she said. “When we got followers from all over the country on Instagram, I decided that’s how we were going to market our business. We posted items every single day and were selling out of things within 24 hours. If we didn’t have Instagram, we wouldn’t be in business.”
The Lee Branch location of South Boutique is much larger than the Trussville store at 3,600 square feet. The new space will include a place to shoot photos and also warehouse space.
Spruiell started out with clothing, then added gifts, accessories, bags and even a signature South candle that she intended to sell in-store only. The candles became a huge hit, and they are now sold in over 250 stores across the country. She contracts her mom, along with five to seven employees, to do the entire process of making and shipping the candles in a space near her hometown of Boaz.
South now features three candles — Gunpowder, Antebellum and Sweet Tea — that have their own Instagram account, @thesouthcandle.
Spruiell believes if the store was named anything else, it might not have been so successful.
“People want to have anything with South on it,” she said.
Spruiell said she has a wide variety of customers and describes them as the best.
“They’ve been with us from the very beginning,” she said. “They’ve become like family. We see some of them three to five times a week.”
The store’s shopping bags are gray and feature the South logo. A special touch is added by tying a piece of cotton with twine.
“We stopped doing it and had to bring it back because our customers missed it,” Spruiell said.
South will be relaunching a new and improved website soon to better serve their online customers. They will also add a wedding registry as well.
“A third store could happen,” she said. “I would like to do one every two years. My next goal is to have one out of state. If I don’t franchise, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing more small stores around the South, and also doing North, East and West stores in the future.”
