Traditional Style with a Modern Twist: How Vicki Clark and Danielle Allison make Victoria’s Ragpatch a success story

Victoria’s Ragpatch just celebrated 48 years of business in the Calabash and Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina area, but the dynamic duo that runs the retail stores is already planning to celebrate in a big way on the 50^th anniversary in a couple of years.

Owner Vicki Clark, 80, and manager Danielle Allison, 30, make quite the pair professionally on the job and as best friends, despite their five-decade age difference.

“I’m not computer savvy, and she is, so she has to be the one who takes care of that sort of thing,” says Clark. “Of course, we do the buying together. We don’t always have the same opinion, but we feel like, between the choices, we come out pretty well with our end product here. After being in the business for a really, really long time, it’s sometimes a little hard to let go and say, ‘All right, you’re right,’ but she’s very good at it.”

“Yeah, we’re like peanut butter and jelly: they’re opposites, and they serve their own purposes, but then, at the same time, peanut butter and jelly together do a really good job,” says Allison. “She may not be tech-savvy, but I don’t have the business savvy that she has. We really collaborate on a lot of different things, and being able to have two different generations of perspectives gives a full lifetime of being able to pull things together and create a bunch of different looks for a wide age range of customers.”

Allison says they curate the inventory at Victoria’s Ragpatch to cater to customers from six months old to 106 years old, with the mothers and grandmothers who shopped here in the 1970s,’80s, and ’90s now passing the same traditions onto their daughters and granddaughters.

The end product? A charming store stocked with over 40 brands of Southern design style apparel, such as Lily Pulitzer, with sweatshirts also being a best-seller.

“There’s not even just one brand that is our bestseller,” says Clark. “I would say it’s the quirky beach coastal lifestyle that we bring into the store, and we put things together differently. We are just so different than any other store, and customers tell us that all the time.”

“With merchandising, so many stores are either going to use all the same line, or all beachy things, or dressy, but we take different lines and that’s what our customer loves and that’s what we built our reputation on, is to cross merchandise,” says Allison. “We can take a top from one company, and it works well with something else that really creates creativity that the customer’s not going to see themselves. No other store is going to put it together like we do.”

Clark adds that her Victoria’s Ragpatch not only carries women’s apparel, but also infant clothes, with brands like Kissy Kissy, as well as books, greeting cards, food, kitchen items, and more. They’ve come a long way since the first store at 600 square feet in Calabash, with open hours only starting at 1 p.m. because of the limited foot traffic at the beach back in the ’70s.

“We always carried really nice clothing,” says Clark, “and people didn’t really expect that. It created an environment for people that was a little bit different from what they expected in the area. People would come from Charlotte or Raleigh, and my customer base is and was from everywhere.”

Clark and Allison couldn’t agree more that their customers’ pleasant shopping experience wouldn’t be possible without the help of their team of female sales associates.

“We could not do it without them, that is for sure,” says Allison. “Because with the two of us running back and forth doing all the time, our team of girls holds it down, and they are absolutely amazing. And, just to speak to Vicky as an owner, there are nine employees currently, and one of the employees has been there 36 years, another has been there for almost 20 years, another one has been there about 17 years, and I personally have been with Vicki for 10 years. So, it just really speaks to her as an employer on just how great, not only she is at business, but also how she is at really building a family out of her employees and our team.”

While Clark isn’t at the stores daily (Allison takes care of the day-to-day management duties), she says she still does a lot of buying, restocking, and deciding on color palettes from home on her iPad, plus FaceTiming with Allison when needed.

“And she does all of the running and getting all the postal things together to ship things to customers. She’s like the artist, and I’m like the paintbrush,” says Allison with a laugh.

“My final thought: not only do we have a professional relationship, Vicki and I are also best friends outside of work,” continues Allison. “It’s really funny to see an 80-year-old and a 30-year-old hanging out on a Sunday afternoon just doing whatever. Even if we didn’t have the stores, Vicki and I would still be best friends. It’s a fun thing to be able to work with your best friend and create a traditional style with a modern twist.”

For more information on Victoria’s Ragpatch, visit them on Facebook and Instagram.