Billy Reid

At 114 North Court Street in downtown Florence, inside a building that once housed a bookstore, Billy Reid runs the flagship store for a fashion label that has grown from a single Manhattan hotel room into a brand with four CFDA awards and shops across the country. Florence is not an incidental location. It is where the designer rebuilt his career after his first company folded in the aftermath of September 11, and it remains the place where the collections are still designed today, with Reid’s studio occupying the building’s upper level while the retail shop operates on the ground floor below.

Billy Reid grew up in Amite, Louisiana, working in his mother’s women’s clothing boutique before studying fashion design and eventually working for Reebok and designing golf apparel for Greg Norman’s line. He launched his own menswear label, William Reid, out of a room at New York’s Hotel Chelsea in 1998, and won the CFDA’s award for Best New Menswear Designer in 2001. When the economic fallout after 9/11 forced that business to close, Reid and his wife relocated to Florence, in part because her family lived across the Tennessee River in the Shoals area. The move became permanent, and it reshaped the direction of his career.

Reid relaunched under his own name, opening the first standalone Billy Reid stores in Dallas and Houston in 2004, initially menswear only, with a women’s collection following in 2007. The Florence flagship came together as the brand’s home base rather than an afterthought, and it shows in how the store is built out. Rather than the glass-and-white-box look common to national fashion retail, the Court Street shop is furnished with antiques and reclaimed architectural materials, an interior style that mirrors the label’s broader design language of Southern-inflected American tailoring: waxed cotton outerwear, herringbone shirting, and updated takes on classic menswear staples, alongside a women’s line built around similar ideas of quality construction over trend-chasing.

The Florence store carries the label’s full men’s and women’s collections, along with shoes and accessories, and the shop offers curated styling appointments for customers who want a more guided visit rather than a self-directed browse. It is worth noting that Billy Reid has expanded well beyond Alabama since its Florence relaunch, with stores now open in cities including New York, Nashville, Charleston, and Dallas. What keeps the Florence location distinct from a typical outpost of a growing brand is that it remains independently owned by the designer himself rather than operated as a licensed or franchised location, and it continues to function as the creative headquarters for everything the label produces.

That headquarters status means the Florence shop often carries pieces, samples, and one-off items that other locations do not, since it sits closest to the design studio itself. The brand has also built its identity in part around its Alabama roots, with collections that regularly nod to Southern craft traditions and materials, and with a company culture that has kept much of its design and production decision-making in Florence rather than centralizing it in a larger fashion market. Locals sometimes point to the store as evidence that a business does not need to leave a small Southern city to compete on a national stage.

The shop keeps hours from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday, fitting easily into a day of exploring downtown Florence’s other shops and restaurants along Court Street and the surrounding blocks. For longtime residents, the store has become a point of civic pride, a reminder that a small city on the Tennessee River produced a nationally recognized fashion label without relocating its headquarters to New York or Los Angeles. For visitors, it offers a rare chance to shop a well-known designer’s collection inside the same building where it is actually designed, something few fashion labels of Billy Reid’s stature can claim anywhere in the country.