NASHVILLE-BOUND: Memphis clothing store Oak Hall is opening a new location.
Firmly rooted in Memphis, Oak Hall takes its time expanding to Nashville
Oak Hall is branching out of town — to Nashville — after 156 years of selling clothes in Memphis.
“The timing with the real estate had a lot to do with it,’’ Will Levy said Tuesday, referring to shop space in the Hill Center Green Hills lifestyle center in southwest Nashville. He’s in the sixth generation of a family that has run Oak Hall since 1859.
“But we also have built up our infrastructure where we feel we are able to serve customers (in Nashville) with the same service we have in Memphis.’’
The flagship store will remain at 6150 Poplar Ave. in Regalia Shopping Center. It has 17,000 square feet of selling space plus room for such operations as the back office, alterations and online sales.
The Nashville store will open, initially, with 2,000 square feet in Hill Center Green Hills and expand to 10,000 square feet in 2017. Hill Center Green Hills is a relatively new lifestyle center in the Green Hills neighborhood peppered with such upscale retailers as Nordstrom, Trader Joe’s and Anthropologie.
The Levy family acknowledges Nashville has other retailers that sell fine clothes, but says no one else offers the kind of personal retail experience Oak Hall is about to export to the Music City.
“Everybody here we feel is part of the Oak Hall family and our customers are part of the extended family,’’ said Bill Levy, Will’s father. “We try to treat people right.’’
And it’s unlikely the competition has a well-behaved Dalmatian named Jake — Bill’s dog — who follows Bill around the store, or homemade treats delivered to the store every Saturday by a Levy family aunt, or occasional cookouts for employees and customers to enjoy.
The Nashville store manager will be Will’s younger cousin, 28-year-old Chris Levy. He’s already busy hiring a Nashville staff, working with architects on the store’s design and ordering the clothes.
“It’s kind of like you’ve got to work from the ground up,’’ said Chris, who most recently worked as a senior merchandise planner for Neiman Marcus in Dallas. “... And now we’re just trying to get all the moving parts to work at the same time. It’s really a fun kind of strategy.’’
The idea of putting an Oak Hall in Nashville is nothing new. “We’ve been looking at Nashville for really 20 years,’’
Bill Levy said.
A market study conducted 15 years ago showed Oak Hall had relatively strong name recognition in Nashville, he said, adding, “We think more people know of us now and we’ve got all kinds of customers that come here who live in Nashville and say ‘We wish there were an Oak Hall in Nashville.’ ”
Oak Hall specializes in men’s and women’s readyto-wear apparel. The Levy family also owns and operates Vineyard Vines in the Regalia Shopping Center as well as in Hill Center Green Hills in Nashville and in Birmingham.