We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brittany Cobb a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

When I started my business in 2009, it was a seasonal flea market pop up. I grew up in California and shopped markets, antique malls and vintage stores my entire life. When I moved to Dallas in 2001, there wasn’t a lot of options to shop this way. The idea to create my own was out of a need. I was also a lifestyle editor at the time meeting talented artisans, creatives and small business owners daily. I had the contacts to put a pop up market together — way before they became trendy — and I went for it. I wanted to solve a problem that I had, but knew deep my in vintage loving soul others had too. I was right and it worked! For ten years I continued to grow the markets across Dallas and even Houston. The idea to stop hosting shows and focus on retail grew from customer feedback. They wanted to shop unique and maker finds more than a few times a year. I opened our first store in 2018, almost a decade after my first show. Our growth recently has been fast, but the foundation for what we do was slowly and solidly built over a decade.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was born and raised in Southern California. In 2001, I moved to Dallas to attend Southern Methodist University and received a major in journalism and minor in art history. Post graduation, I spent ten years writing lifestyle articles for The Dallas Morning News, Forbes, Lucky, DailyCandy and other publications.

I launched The Dallas Flea – a quarterly pop up shopping event featuring a wide range of vendors – in 2009. In 2015, I rebranded the concept as Flea Style to span to other Texas cities and enter e-commerce to sell curated goods and makers’ finds to our brand’s growing audience.

In 2018, I bought and renovated a historical 5,000 square foot building in downtown Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood to house a retail store, event studio and our corporate headquarters that includes its shipping and distribution departments.

In 2019, I opened a second retail location in Frisco at the Dallas Cowboys’ world headquarters at The Star. Inside the 6,300 square foot space I started my first culinary venture dubbed Heirloom Haul, a delicious eatery that specializes in tea service, sandwiches, salads and specialty sips and lattes.

Heirloom Haul is inspired by the scratch-made food found in antique malls that I frequented as a child.

In 2021 I was approached about a concept store in the Hotel Drover, an Autograph Collection hotel located at the famous Fort Worth Stockyards’ booming Mule Alley shopping district. In July, I opened Wide Brim, a highly-curated hotel lobby store that offers apparel, jewelry, accessories and hats for the wanderlust.

In October 2021, I opened a 3,300 square foot store along with a Heirloom Haul beverage bar and Flea Style’s signature hat bar.

I’ve always loved hats and now all stores house our experiential hat bar concept that allows shoppers to make one-of-a-kind looks that fit their personal style. Last year, we inked a partnership deal with iconic American hat brand Stetson to create a custom “Brittany” hat exclusive for Flea Style lovers in a myriad of bespoke colors and styles.

With everything we do across all brands, I’m most proud of our authentic connection and celebration of our amazing customers. We pride ourselves on creating and cultivating experiences, spaces and lifestyle products that support unique style and small businesses. We try to tell that story through everything we do to make our customers feel unique, beautiful and inspired when they walk through our doors.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I pivot daily! Sometimes it’s on a tiny thing — changing a call to action on our site to make it clearer for a customer’s experience — and sometimes it’s huge.

A big example is Flea Style Summit. About six years ago, I wanted to inspire our makers and customers more than through our markets and decided to launch a cool conference for creatives. It was a place where like-minded people gathered for a day of panels, conversations, break out sessions, delicious food, etc.

People loved it. In fact, most people attended all three of the summits we hosted over a couple years. But, they didn’t make any money. They were a huge time commitment for my team and me, and didn’t pay the bills. So although it made my heart happy to host these, it didn’t make any business sense and I decided to shut it down after giving it my all.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The biggest example of my resilience is navigating Covid. Running businesses that require people to work on site, be near others and host events has been nearly impossible at times during this pandemic.

We’ve never folded our cards during the past two years though and have committed to finding creative ways to stay open and succeed. One of the biggest examples of this was opening our online store to continue to connect with customers and bring in money for the company while our doors were forced to be shut.

We’ve also made our stores more experiential than ever so our customers have activities and a safe, fun space during these curtain times. Our hat bars are the perfect example of this.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fleastyle.com
• Instagram: @fleastyle @heirloomhaul @shopwidebrim

Image Credits
Flea Style