Where ‘trendy’ wears well

READY TO WEAR: Dixie Carroll and Bill Jette, owners of J Marcel on Hope Street in Providence, are seen in their newly opened shop on Maple Avenue in Barrington. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
READY TO WEAR: Dixie Carroll and Bill Jette, owners of J Marcel on Hope Street in Providence, are seen in their newly opened shop on Maple Avenue in Barrington. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Dixie Carroll never daydreamed about owning her own store. That wasn’t the origin of J Marcel, a women’s clothing and accessories store that started in Providence and recently expanded into a second location in Barrington.

She started out instead as a web-based entrepreneur, as a side to her day job, selling shoes on eBay and Amazon.

At the time, she and her husband, Bill Jette, lived in Nashville, Tenn., where she was completing her MBA in entrepreneurship at Belmont University. Her shoe stock came from overstocks at Nine West, Zappos and other suppliers.

When the couple moved to Rhode Island in the mid-2000s, the shoes came with them to their home in East Providence. Because it was a smaller house than they had in Tennessee, the stock soon consumed the garage and basement, as well as a storage unit.

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“We recognized we needed some kind of a warehouse,” said Carroll.

One afternoon, as they shopped on Hope Street in Providence, they noticed among the open storefronts an open retail space. They spoke to the owner. “We told him we had no interest in being a retail store,” Carroll said. Instead, they planned to store the goods there.

To make the space look inviting, they set it up as a retail store, even if the idea was to use it as storage for online sales. That was the plan, anyway.

What actually happened was people started coming in, and before they knew it, they had a retail operation.

“People were like ants to a sugar cube,” Carroll said. “If they know you’re there, they’ll keep coming.”

The mix of goods eventually changed, to focus less on shoes than apparel. This year, eight years after J Marcel opened its doors, the store carries no shoes, but offers a mix of women’s retail items, including apparel, accessories and gifts.

What the owners have learned, through experience, is that customers will come in for the apparel, but the greatest returns come from sale of accessories.

Earlier this year, Carroll and Jette opened a second store in Barrington. It is located in a highly visible location, on Maple Avenue.

Compared to the original store, its focus is more shifted toward home goods, partly due to the economic profile of Barrington, which has many homeowners, but also because the product is sold by many established retail competitors in Providence.

The approach at J Marcel is a curated collection of what a trend-conscious woman might be interested in wearing.

The products are found in Los Angeles, New York and other locations. The idea is you won’t find them in the mall, or down the street at another shop.

Both Jette and Carroll have business backgrounds that have helped to shape their stores, he in corporate sales and she in entrepreneurship. At J. Marcel, they both act as buyers. That’s not something they delegate.

“We do it through a tactile and visual feel for these products,” said Jette. •

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