Walk into 1001 S. Croatan Highway these days and you will notice something a little unusual before you notice the merchandise. One half of the room holds racks of secondhand denim, curated dresses, and the kind of accessories you find at a well-edited consignment shop. The other half holds refinished dressers, salvaged lighting, and small custom furniture pieces. Two businesses, one address, one register. That is not a design choice. It is a survival strategy, and it tells you more about how Kill Devil Hills keeps its local shops alive than any single storefront opening does on its own.
The tenants are Coastal Consignment Boutique and Fresh Design Co., and the way they set up shop together is the real story here.
Two Names, One Front Door
Coastal Consignment Boutique spent more than a year building a following through pop-ups and markets around the Outer Banks before its owners, longtime locals Karyl Rhodes and Mary Phelan Toohey, committed to a permanent space. When they finally opened their brick-and-mortar location on Croatan Highway this spring, they did not fill the whole footprint with clothing racks. They split it with Fresh Design Co., the home-décor line run by local stylist and interior designer Kallie Winter, who fills her side with refinished and upcycled furniture, lighting, and custom pieces.
Coastal Consignment and Fresh Design Co. had already been supporting local nonprofits together through donations and fundraising before they shared a lease. Now that partnership has a physical address, and the two brands plan to keep running joint events and pop-ups from inside it.
That detail matters more than it looks. A shared storefront means shared rent on one of the busiest commercial corridors on the northern Outer Banks. It means two small, women-owned businesses covering overhead together instead of separately, each getting foot traffic the other might not draw alone. It is a quietly practical answer to a question every small retailer on this stretch of highway has to solve: how do you keep a storefront open on a road built for national chains.
The Highway Nobody Warned You About
That question is not abstract. Drive north or south on Croatan Highway, which locals call the Bypass, and you pass a Target, a Publix, a Food Lion, a CVS, a Lowe's, an AutoZone, and North Carolina's first Wawa, which opened here in 2024 as the leading edge of a planned 80-store expansion across the eastern part of the state. This is a highway built for volume retail, not for two friends splitting a lease to sell consignment dresses and refinished end tables.
That is exactly why the Coastal Consignment and Fresh Design Co. arrangement is worth paying attention to if you live here and actually want these kinds of shops to stick around. A single small storefront trying to compete with big-box rent on the Bypass is a harder bet than two of them sharing one. If this model works for Rhodes, Toohey, and Winter, it is a reasonable guess that it will show up again in the next storefront that opens along this same road.
The Blacksmith Behind the Gallery Door
The sharing instinct did not start with this store. It has been operating for years at the KDH Cooperative, an artist-run gallery tucked into a stretch of the Bypass that most people drive past without a second look. The Cooperative is not one shop. It is dozens of local artists working under a single roof and a single membership structure, which is its own version of the same math: no individual painter, potter, or jeweler could likely carry a standalone storefront on Croatan Highway rent, but a cooperative of them can.
One of the more specific tenants inside that gallery is the Manteo Blacksmith Shop, run by Randy Hodges, who works mostly in wrought iron. It is an odd and wonderful thing to find a working blacksmith operating out of a shared gallery space a few doors down from a Dollar Tree, but that juxtaposition is Kill Devil Hills in miniature. The chains hold down the highway frontage. The makers hold down whatever square footage they can share.
Tuesdays Had a Schedule This Summer
The same logic showed up on a different kind of calendar this year. The Town of Kill Devil Hills ran its First Flight Farmers Market every Tuesday morning from June 16 through August 4 at Aviation Park, with around 50 vendors setting up each week to sell produce, baked goods, woodworking, photography, paintings, jewelry, and candles. That market wrapped for the season a couple of weeks ago, but it is worth understanding as one more version of the same pattern already showing up in that consignment shop on the Bypass. A farmers market is, structurally, dozens of small sellers sharing one set of tables, one time slot, and one piece of town-owned land, because none of them individually could justify a standalone spot on a Tuesday morning. If you missed it this year, the town has run it on this same Tuesday rhythm before, and it is a safe bet Aviation Park sees the vendors back on a similar schedule next summer.
What This Adds Up To
None of these three examples exist in isolation. A consignment boutique splitting a storefront with a furniture designer, a cooperative gallery housing a working blacksmith among dozens of other artists, and a town-run farmers market that only works because fifty vendors show up together rather than one at a time are all the same economic instinct wearing different clothes. Small, independent sellers in Kill Devil Hills are not trying to out-compete the chains on Croatan Highway for square footage. They are finding ways to share it.
If you already shop local here, that is useful to know the next time you see a new storefront go up on the Bypass with two names on the sign instead of one. It is not a branding gimmick. It is very likely the only way that particular shop is still going to be open a year from now. And if you are the kind of person who likes knowing why your town works the way it does, this is a better answer than "small businesses are struggling" or "shop local" bumper-sticker sentiment. There is an actual structure behind it, and it is playing out in real time about a mile from the beach.
Next time you are on the Bypass, stop into 1001 S. Croatan Highway and see the arrangement for yourself. Then swing by the KDH Cooperative and see if Randy Hodges is at his forge. Both stops tell the same story about how this town keeps its small shops alive, just in a different accent.
I live and work in this stretch of the Outer Banks, and I notice these details because they matter for more than curiosity. How a town's small businesses survive says something real about its long-term character, and that is worth knowing whether you are shopping here this weekend or thinking ahead to owning property here someday. If you ever want to talk through what is happening in Kill Devil Hills, on the Bypass or off it, Cameron Griggs would love to hear from you. Let's Connect.
