Salt Life ready to fish in downtown Columbus retail waters

A couple of blocks from the Chattahoochee River, a Columbus-based apparel and lifestyle company is going to try a retail experiment worthy of the nation’s most notable beaches.

Salt Life, currently with three stores in Huntington Beach, Calif., San Clemente, Calif., and Jacksonville Beach, Fla., plans to open a full-blown retail store in the 1100 block of Broadway next month, President Jeff Stillwell said recently.

“Our strategy is to open two to four retail stores a year over the next five years,” Stillwell said. “At some point, we need to see how we will perform away from the coast. ... It’s right around the corner and we can keep our eyes on it. It just makes sense.”

The company was founded in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., in 2003. Stillwell took control of the brand in 2011. The product line in the new store will include apparel such as shirts and shorts, and it will also include items like beach towels, baseball caps, bags, sunglasses and other items that compliment the apparel, Stillwell said.

The Salt Life brand is in about 2,200 retail stores nationwide, including Bass Pro Shops, Cabela’s, Academy Sports & Outdoors, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Belk department store and assorted smaller surf and fishing and tackle shops.

The sales at those stores are intriguing enough for Stillwell to want to test the retail waters away from the coast.

“We actually sometimes perform better in the interior of the country than on the coast,” Stillwell said. “People will say, ‘I can’t believe that.’ I will say, ‘Well, think about it: If you happen to live in Kansas City, maybe you get to the beach once a year on vacation. Or you like to fish and you and your buddies do a guys trip every other year or so.’ Well, the rest of the time you wish you could do it. Sometimes better for us they want to be a part of that and wearing Salt Life makes them a part of that.”

And Columbus, less than three and a half hours from the Florida Gulf coast and four hours from the Georgia coast, makes sense as a test market for another reason, Stillwell said.

“Where do people from here vacation? The beach, Panama City, Destin,” Stillwell said. “They go fishing. They have homes. That’s where they go on the weekends. We are a lot more of a salt water community than you may think.”

The corporate headquarters is located on 12th Street in downtown Columbus. There is also an office in Jacksonville Beach, a distribution center in Fayetteville, N.C., and design offices in California. The company employs about 30 people in the Columbus office and has about 150 employees across the country in distribution and retail.

The new store will be in space vacated last year by Big Dog Running Company. It will be a traditional retail store and not an outlet, Stillwell said of the nearly 3,000-square-foot space.

Stillwell admits he was somewhat reluctant about doing the test in Columbus, but the space quickly arrested those fears.

“I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I can support what we need to do in the way we build out our retail stores,’” he said. “We are not just putting pictures in. We are putting the full package in and having it installed. ... When this location came about and I realized all of the work that had been done in there, it greatly limited the build out.”

The Columbus location will have a similar look to the other stores, Stillwell said.

“If we cut corners, it will not be a full test,” he said. “But the fact that everything, the floors, the walls, had been redone made our cost of entry into this area easier to do as a test store.”

Another plus is resurgence of downtown Columbus.

“Since we are headquartered here, we looked at everything that is happening in Columbus — all the growth coming downtown with the two new hotels and apartment complex coming, the schools, the people you see shopping,” Stillwell said.

The company is going to have no problem finding the about a dozen employees to staff the store. It advertised for the jobs last month and the response was overwhelming, Stillwell said.

“It was amazing,” Stillwell said. “We put up a couple of fliers and ran an ad and within two days we had just under 400 applicants.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2017 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Salt Life ready to fish in downtown Columbus retail waters."