Three generations of Rippes include (left to right) Sam, Ben and Buddy.
Founders Benjamin and Annie Rippe
While other independent shoe store owners wrangle about what handbags to carry, Ben Rippe often faces a different dilemma—whether to put a particular line of purses in his shoe store or his women’s clothing store, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. He admits it can be a tough call. What to do with roomy fox fur bags? Both stores are carrying them.
Rippe’s Shoes opened in fall 2006, replacing the shoe department added six years earlier to Rippe’s, a women’s apparel store that is the flagship of this Danville, Va., family enterprise. Shoe sales have nearly doubled, and owner Ben Rippe expects them to grow at an increasingly higher rate. It’s not that shoe sales were entirely new for the venerable retailer, a downtown fixture for more than 80 years, sticking it out when others stores left for the malls. Rippe’s sold shoes for many years, but hadn’t in recent decades.
Rippe joined the business full time in 1979, a few years after earning a bachelor’s in agronomy from Virginia Tech. After graduation he managed farmland in Northern Virginia for a year, then returned to the university to earn a graduate degree in agricultural economics and work for an agricultural extension project. Traveling on business, he coincidentally caught the same flight as his father, Murray, who was on a buying trip. With the store manager leaving, now is the time to join the business if you’re going to, his father told him.
A guidance counselor had encouraged Ben to find a career that tapped his love for the outdoors, and he felt like he’d “found his niche” in agriculture. Still, the decision to join the family business was an easy one: “It just seemed like the thing to do,” he says easily. Though he didn’t finish his master’s in agricultural economy, he earned one in business administration at Duke University’s prestigious Fuqua School of Business in 1987.
Rippe has no regrets about changing career paths: “We’re into this for the long haul. It’s a lifestyle.” And it’s one that follows in the footsteps of his father and mother, Esther, as well as his grandparents, Benjamin A. and Annie, who started the business in 1907. Back then, tobacco wholesaling was big business in Danville. The store sold apparel, fabric and sewing items in the busy tobacco warehouse district. When it moved downtown about a dozen years later to serve an increasingly “sophisticated” clientele, it dropped piece goods to focus on selling clothing, shoes and accessories—hats were a specialty.
Mayor Wayne Williams and former mayor and now Councilwoman Ruby Archie join Rippe for the shoe store ribbon-cutting.
In 1947, Rippe’s built a new store downtown. About 20 years later, the family bought and expanded into a neighboring building. The spacious apparel store, which also houses Rippe’s Furs, has several art deco touches, including a curving staircase that leads to the company’s offices. Next door at Rippe’s Shoes, curving glass block exterior windows continue the art deco theme, as do the interior display cases and sitting areas, designed by New Era Store Design, an NSRA member. A salt-and- pepper terrazzo walkway winds toward a wide interior passageway that leads into the apparel store.
Until Rippe’s Shoes opened, Danville area residents had to travel elsewhere to shop in person for many of the 40 or so women’s shoe brands the store carries. It’s a wide mix that includes comfort footwear such as Merrell, Dansko and Naot and dress brands like J. Renee, Vaneli, Jessica Bennett, Cole Haan, Stuart Weitzman and Donald J Pliner. Ugg boots are big sellers. The apparel side of the business stocks moderate-to-better brands and carries some designer lines.
Rippe’s apparel’s typical shopper is age 35 and up, while Rippe’s Shoes pulls in more younger customers. But most shoppers peruse both stores, and many fashion-conscious long-timers are discovering that comfort footwear can be quite stylish. Comfort sandals, Rippe notes, were a big seller this summer.
The three Rippe’s businesses together employ 15 people full- and part-time. Workers are cross-trained to sell furs, clothes and shoes, and are paid a base wage that Rippe says is high for the area. Benefits include a retirement plan and health insurance. There are individual sales incentives, but most incentive pay is team-based.
Over the years, Rippe’s management pondered whether to stay downtown. “‘Should we go to that mall? Should we go to that strip center?’ Every time there was a decision to make, we decided to stay,” Rippe recalls. “Now downtown has rejuvenated.” In recent years there’s been an influx of businesses, specialty retailers, residents and shoppers. Buildings, many with notable Victorian architecture, have been fixed up and restored. Rippe bought the shoe store building in 2005 and renovated it with help from federal, state and local economic development programs, working through the Main Street Program, which was designed to help communities leverage funds for preservation- based economic development that fosters downtown revitalization. Together, they picked up about a fifth of the tab.
Named the Danville Pittsylvania County Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year in 2007, Rippe’s also serves its community through scholarships to area colleges, and hosts an annual Fashion Show Benefit for Breast Cancer. The company has truly become a downtown institution, a place where many loyal regulars’ mothers and grandmothers shop or shopped. But Rippe says its staying power comes from its forward outlook, one that stays on top of fashion trends and courts new and established customers.
These days, it’s getting easier to build the customer base. Danville is a commercial center in the Piedmont area near the North Carolina border, with some 200,000 people living within a 40- mile radius. Now starting a comeback after the hard times that hit the tobacco and textile industries, the area draws retirees and others attracted by the natural beauty (rolling hills), lifestyle (slowpaced but still city living), and location (within several hours of the mountains, coast and larger metropolitan area like Raleigh-Durham, N.C.)
Back in 2000, however, retail consultants advised Rippe not to branch into shoe sales. “We’re glad we didn’t listen to them,” he smiles. Yes, turnover and gross margins are lower, but he’s found footwear to be a “worthwhile” business and a natural fit with apparel. He joined NSRA when the shoe department opened and credits the organization with making his shoe store launch relatively easy. “NSRA helped me get into the shoe business,”he says. “We started using NSRA right away.” He likes that the association’s selling course is so detailed and says the credit card and shipping programs brought immediate financial benefits.
Before adding shoes, Rippe recruited Peggy Burch, who’s worked in shoe sales some 30 years. She says customers are attracted by more than the quality brands and classy interior at Rippe’s Shoes: “I think they are very impressed with the customer service—that we still actually measure, fit the shoe on the foot, and gauge.” She and other salespeople often call customers when new arrivals come in, or when a big event is coming up.
Shoppers on Rippe’s customer list receive gift certificates for their birthdays and mailings about store events. But they don’t have to wait for a trunk show to enjoy complimentary beverages and treats in the copper-topped coffee/tea bar beneath the stairs. When Rippe was a teen-ager, a “Linger Lounge” was tucked in this spot, offering free soda to junior shoppers. Who lingers these days? “Often it’s men whose wives and girlfriends are shopping,” says Rippe. “The men sort of cool their heels while the women are shopping.”
Under this staircase, a “Linger Lounge” offered free soda to junior shoppers. Today, coffee is available near a seating area.
As a youth Rippe helped his parents out, marking down clothes for after-Christmas sales and setting up for fashion shows. During his teens, Rippe learned the trade by working at the family’s store part-time and was employed full-time at a men’s apparel store. Now married and the father of a 12-year-old son, Rippe bought out his parents in 1992. Both (he’s 91, she’s 87) still stop by the store occasionally.
Burch says Rippe’s work ethic has helped him lead and expand the family business. “He works like a Trojan,”she says. “When he comes in, he eyeballs the whole store. If something’s not in place he will definitely spot it. Most of us are trained to do that, but he has the eagle eye.
“He keeps his hand in everything. [The business] just keeps growing.”
For more information on the Rippe family of businesses, visit www.rippes.com.
From Shoe Retailing Today, January-February 2008, pp. 30–33; article also available in PDF format.