Since 2016, The Orange Beach Store has been a go-to gift and souvenir shop in Orange Beach, Alabama. The seaside retailer offers a variety of name-dropped apparel, drinkware, picture frames and jewelry for tourists visiting the beach town and locals alike.
“We’re a small beach town, but about 8 million tourists come every year,” says Malia Price, store manager at The Orange Beach Store.
Last month, the seaside retailer had the opportunity to expand when it relocated to a new storefront in town on Perdido Beach Boulevard, just a mile from the old storefront.
“We really just wanted to move because our old store was one of the oldest buildings in Orange Beach, and it was tiny,” says Price. “It was just a short walk to the beach, but a lot of people did not see it and did not know where it was.”
The new store officially opened at the Perdido Beach Boulevard location on March 4.
“It’s been better for business — more tourists have stopped in. We have a lot more visibility where we are now,” Price says.
Price describes the new storefront as spacious and modern yet homey. She adds that the storefront on Perdido Beach Boulevard is 4,000 square feet, almost four times larger than the old storefront.
“We’ve completely expanded what we offered from before,” she shares. “We have tons of new lines and expanded all of the things we already had.”
Since relocating to the new storefront, Price says the retailer also launched a fundraiser for local Orange Beach schools. She says the store features a whole section of school-themed merchandise that appeals to locals, including school T-shirts, uniforms and other apparel. All sales from that section go back to support education in the schools.
“The school systems here have a lot of fundraising for athletics but not so much for the actual education,” Price explains. “So we look at this as free retail space for the school. We use all our vendor connections to get good deals on merchandise. It’s a quick and easy way for schools to raise money for education.”
Reception to the new storefront has also been positive among the retailer’s recurring customers, she shares.
“A lot of people didn’t expect this store to be so large,” she says. “We want to continue to exceed customers’ expectations, always offering new things, always expanding our merchandise and changing things up and never getting to be boring. Even if a new set of people come through here every week, we want locals to be able to step in every month and have the store look completely different.”
