After 50 years in Jackson, the historic women’s clothing store, The Bridal Path, is pulling up roots and moving to Madison.
The Bridal Path can trace its roots to Jackson back to 1970 when Rosemary Douglass and two friends, Berry Farr and Martha Allen, opened it in The Quarter on Lakeland Drive. The location changed in 1982 when the business took over an old house on Lakeland Drive and again in 1991 when it moved to its current location in Banner Hall at 4465 I-55 North, Jackson.
But current owner Audrey McCarty said the business has outgrown its location in Banner Hall off Exit 100 on I-55, and she is overseeing the construction of an entirely new building where Madison Parkway and Main Street meet.
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The new building is expected to be completed early in 2023.
“We have loved, loved, loved our neighbors in Banner Hall, but we are unfortunately completely out of room,” said McCarty, whose family bought the destination shopping location four years ago. “The Lord has blessed us exponentially. When sales are triple what they were before, it’s just hard to do it with the same amount of space and storage, with the same amount of employees.”
While McCarty said she is grateful for what Jackson and the Banner Hall location have offered the business over the years, the area in Madison is precisely what she was looking for.
And Madison Mayor Mary Hawkins-Butler is glad to have the shopping institution.
“The presence of Bridal Path will be a strong anchor for our downtown,” Hawkins-Butler said. “Their choice in moving such an established business to Madison solidifies the vision and stability of our downtown. We welcome them with open arms.”
McCarty, who was 21 at the time, took ownership of the Bridal Path in 2018, along with her sister, Amelia Jarvis and her mother, Janie Jarvis. McCarty was fresh out of school at Mississippi State but had already worked at Bridal Path for several years. Now, she is the driving force behind the store and wants it to be a one-stop-shop for brides. She believes her clients will welcome the opportunity to have a bridal shopping experience in Downtown Madison.
The new location will have roughly 10,000 square feet and an open feel with an expansive floor plan that will allow brides to enjoy their experience.
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It is designed to look like it is two stories, and some of it will be, but there will be a lot of high ceilings and natural light flowing throughout the building.
Dean and Dean Architects are leading the design of the facility.
“In the beginning, we never planned to move, but as we continued to grow, we knew we would have to do it in a space where we had the room to do that.”
The Bridal Path offers wedding dresses, accessories, shoes, mothers’ dresses, bride’s maids’ dresses, flower girls’ dresses and alterations for everything.
“We love being able to do that, and we are really the only place that you can do all of that under one roof,” McCarty said.
She said that owning the business for the last four years has allowed her to plan out what she really needs and wants in a space and the only way to get what she wants is to build.
“It’s like living in a rental house and being able to plan to build a house based on your current experiences,” McCarty. “I don’t think I would have been able to grasp the understanding of what needed to be done differently unless I had experienced it the way it is now.”
McCarty and her family purchased the entire corner between Main Street and Madison Parkway across from Half Shell Oyster House. That leaves room for other businesses to come in and purchase space within the development.
McCarty said the location is highly desirable.
“So, we are hoping for someone else really neat to come and be there, too,” she said. “Once we started looking at that spot, it just made sense. We had driven past it a million times but just never put the pieces together that that was where we needed to be.”
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She said she knows some people will be disappointed that the Bridal Path is moving out of Jackson, just from a historical standpoint.
“But I really feel like Bridal Path is definitely a destination. So, if it’s in Jackson or Timbuktu, people will come for a wedding dress,” McCarty said. “We have a lot of out-of-state customers. So, if they are driving from two, three or four hours away, we think they will make it to Madison instead of Jackson.”
She also said that in planning the building at that particular location, they were keenly aware of being at the entrance to Downtown Madison and the historical nature of the rest of the area.
“We wanted to make it look like we had taken an older building and updated it to what we needed it to be,” McCarty said. “We tried to design a building that looked like it had been part of the downtown area forever.”