Belk’s latest collaboration highlights its private label, along with some Southern charm.
The department store’s owned brand, Crown & Ivy, is once again in partnership with Sewing Down South, a lifestyle brand co-founded by reality TV star Craig Conover of “Southern Charm,” fame. The resulting coastal-inspired collection can be found in Belk stores, on its website and in a pop-up shop in the city that inspired the line — Charleston, South Carolina.
The location, which is next to Sewing Down South’s flagship store, allows customers to shop the full collection, along with other pieces from Crown & Ivy, through the end of July. The latest collab features over 120 styles across women’s and men’s apparel, home goods, accessories and, for the first time, jewelry.
Jewelry was an obvious addition because Belk has had recent success with the category. “Jewelry was a piece that we felt was a white space from the previous season,” JJon Bollman, Belk’s senior vice president and general merchandising manager, said in an interview with Retail Dive. “How do you entertain? How do you pull it all together? We’ve got tons of women’s products. We’ve got men’s products. We’ve got the home represented where you can really start to entertain. ... That’s so important to our culture down here in the South. And jewelry just felt like a miss to not have. So we wanted to go after that as well.”
It’s the third time the retailer has collaborated with the brand, but the second time it has done a pop-up with Sewing Down South, according to Bollman. The first iteration last year was “very successful,” he said. “What was different this year is that we actually launched it with Crown & Ivy main-line product and now we’ve layered in the Sewing Down South collab on top of that.”
Having brick-and-mortar representation in Charleston represents the heart of the private label. “There may be customers that are walking down King Street that aren’t Belk shoppers, or aren’t even department store shoppers. And they can really get a taste of sort of who we are and what we represent, and what they might be missing out on,” Bollman said.
Crown & Ivy isn’t just a private label, rather Bollman likes to think of it as an exclusive brand. It was first launched in 2014 as an apparel line for modern Southern women. The collection was meant to provide an everyday foundation of separates that were designed to be mixed and matched. The label has since grown to become the company’s largest brand.
Belk describes the label as capturing the company’s Southern DNA. “There’s not an area within our building that does not have Crown & Ivy. From women’s apparel to sleepwear to men’s, kids, home, footwear, accessories. It is a whole house brand for us in every sense of the word,” Bollman said. “We really build the entire Southeastern outfit with Crown & Ivy.”
Bollman declined to give revenue numbers for the label, but did say that it “represents who we are as an organization. We’re a Southeastern department store, and that is what we do with Crown & Ivy. All our focus, all of our attention, and the inspiration that we get comes from our footprint for this brand.”
As for pop-up stores in its future, Bollman said, “potentially, it depends on how this one goes. We’re very happy with the results that we had, even with just the Crown & Ivy main-line product in that store.”
The department store has recently been experimenting more with store concepts. In 2023, the company opened its first outlet location, and at the end of last year debuted smaller-format Market stores. Belk recently collaborated with BeautySpace to open shop-in-shop concepts within five Belk stores to offer a curated selection of beauty products from top brands.
