When you step into a shop called Southern Style in downtown Opp, you can expect to be greeted warmly. It’s something that comes naturally to the shop’s co-owners, and they make sure that the others working there follow their lead.
They want you to feel welcome but not like you’re being pressured, and they want you to feel free to explore the retail space at your own pace, if that’s what you would rather do.
“Everybody needs to be spoken to when they come in our doors,” says Savanna Jackson Bruce, who founded the south-central Alabama business in 2009. “We’ll say hello to them and ask if there’s something we can help them with.”
Her business partner, Julie Moody, helps to explain their philosophy: “You don’t just stand behind a counter and wait for them to come to you. We want them to know we’re there to help, but at the same time you don’t follow them around the store and bug them.”
Of course, many of the visitors are repeat customers who are already quite acquainted with the layout and offerings at Southern Style. The store has long been an automatic go-to for gifts for loved ones, and since 2012 it has been located inside the historic Dean’s Pharmacy building, which was already iconic for generations.
Moody, who also serves as the District Court judge, jokes that if you do have trouble finding it, just look for the tallest building in town, a sturdy red-brick structure that’s three stories high.
Those who live in the area are fully aware of not just its physical prominence at the corner of Main Street and Hart Avenue, but also its importance to the community. Some even see Southern Style as a cornerstone of the small city’s efforts to revitalize its quaint central business district that is bouncing back from economic hard times.
“It’s hard to say that they are not an influence,” says Madison Sowell, executive administrator of the Opp & Covington County Area Chamber of Commerce. “Even if it’s indirectly, them being right there in that location has encouraged other businesses to join in right in that area.”
Bruce and Moody say they don’t necessarily see themselves as leaders in that sense, but they are glad to have more company downtown and hope to see even more small retailers moving in.
Across the street from them is the popular Wheelhouse restaurant, owned and operated since 2019 by Merrill Culverhouse, who also is a pharmacist in the nearby town of Luverne.
A block to the south, on Covington Avenue, several other small businesses have more recently brought new life to old buildings, many of which date back to the first half of the 20th Century. Those newer businesses include Small Town Donuts, which is run by Mayor Chance McCurley, as well as the popular Grit + Grind Coffee, Emerge Nutrition and a State Farm insurance office.
In addition, the police department and the chamber of commerce recently moved into an old Wells Fargo bank location on Main Street, and the Opp Cultural Arts Center has opened next door to Southern Style. A new farmer’s market, built on the site of an old cotton gin just a few blocks away, is drawing visitors twice a week.
For restaurateur Culverhouse, all of this is exciting because he remembers very well when downtown Opp had all but dried up. In fact, seeing the four lanes of Main Street that run beside his eatery is a reminder of the roadway being filled with a steady stream of motorists heading to and from Florida on vacation. That’s when Main Street itself was a heavily traveled segment of U.S. 31, before the U.S. 331 bypass was built to the east in the early 2000s.
“There was a time when downtown Opp was so busy in the summers that you couldn’t walk across the street,” Culverhouse remembers, “and some of the people would stop and buy things like gas and food and maybe shop in some of the local stores.”
He and others in town blame the city’s economic downturn on something even more significant, the demise of a once-bustling textile industry. Several companies shut down a few decades back, including the major employer Opp & Micolas Cotton Mill. “They made fabric and at their peak they probably employed 1,500 or 1,600 people,” says Culverhouse. “They held on longer than the others and when they finally closed that was the proverbial nail in the economy. We do have one sewing factory left, American Apparel, which makes military uniforms and things like that.”
At the hospitable Southern Style these days, a big part of their success lies in the personal and professional expertise they provide in the custom of gift giving. Moody extends the credit in this area to Bruce, whom she describes as incredibly creative and proficient. Her work includes engraving and monogramming and designing heat-press images to help people celebrate holidays and special events. Southern Style sets up registries for occasions like bridal showers and baby showers as well as birthdays and holidays and all manner of other special events. Bruce has made t-shirts for dance recitals and softball tryouts, for instance, as well as sashes for the Rattlesnake Rodeo queens.
“People will send their gifts to their friends or their family members to congratulate them or wish them luck, and Savanna has always been able to personalize a lot of those gifts,” says Moody. “It makes people feel like they’re getting a really special gift for their special person.”
Another key component of their business plan is that they offer free delivery, which keeps them on the run during peak times for celebrations like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and graduation season, plus plenty of weddings.
Moody says about a third of their sales include delivery, and cites this situation as an example: “If it’s a bridal registry and the shower is going to be on a Sunday afternoon, Savanna gathers all of those gifts together and delivers them to the event ahead of time so when the people arrive the gifts are already there on display.”
Others in the community admire her kindness and her attention to detail. “She does so much for us, and we make sure that she doesn’t go unnoticed and that she gets her recognition,” says the chamber’s Sowell. “We have spotlighted her in the past because she deserves it, truly. She’s a very down-to-earth lady and she just wants to make everybody happy, so I think she doesn’t realize the impact that she actually has.”
For her part, Moody oversees many of the merchandising and inventory aspects of the business and creates the eye-catching displays that attract shoppers. Bruce handles the day-to-day operations during the week while Moody is taking care of her judicial duties at her office and in the courtroom. “I come in at night and on weekends,” Moody says, “and compared to my everyday job, it’s something that’s very calming.”
Across Hart Avenue, Culverhouse’s restaurant also has found a solid place in the community in the six years it’s operated in a building that over the years had housed a bakery, a post office and a peanut butter plant.
“My goal was to provide some jobs and somewhere for people to come and have business meetings and something different to eat,” he says. “Before, all we had really was fast food. When my wife and I would go out of town to eat, we would see people from Opp no matter where we went, whether it was Dothan, Destin or Andalusia. They were all leaving Opp and going somewhere else to eat, and of course that’s tax money leaving our town.”
He hopes other business owners will step up to help revive Opp and offers a few reasons. “It’s convenience, first of all, meaning that people don’t have to go out of town for everything that you need, and of course it keeps your money local,” he says. “What do they say, that one dollar flips six times in a community? If we don’t have any kind of tax base, we can’t run our city and provide services.”
The women behind Southern Style want to see the downtown become even more vibrant, with more opportunities for people to walk the sidewalks from merchant to merchant, as they did during Opp’s earlier days. They both see it happening in other areas, and they like what they see. Moody mentions Fairhope, down on Mobile Bay, while Bruce offers a comparison closer to home. “When I go to Troy, they’ve got shops all around the square,” she says, “and I like to hit every one of them.”
Moody points out that they are proponents of a nationwide campaign called Shop Small, which emphasizes supporting local, independent businesses. “I think people are understanding that it helps them and it helps us to shop locally,” says Moody, “and that we offer things that larger stores don’t.”
Jim Hannaford and Julie Bennett are freelance contributors to Business Alabama. He is based in Foley and she in Auburn.
This article appears in the July 2026 issue of Business Alabama.
