On the second floor of Ponce City Market, up the spiral staircases, there’s an intoxicating aroma that begs you follow it to its source. The scent trail, a mix of fruit and sandalwood, leads you to a pair of stores — the Souk Bohemian and Nomad.
Step inside and you find a nearly 2,000-square-foot earthy oasis within the hustle and bustle of the Beltline live-work-play attraction. The fragrant oil blends waft in the air setting the mood along with the beat of world music.
Clothes are organized by color, mostly neutrals like creams, greens, browns and blacks. Jewelry is displayed on slabs of travertine or dangling off Turkish ceramics. The walls are limewashed and a mud-clay fireplace sits against a wall, giving the space a cozy, natural feel — distinct from the market’s steel, brick and wood aesthetic.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The stores are the vision of Vanessa Coore Vernon, CEO and creative curator of The Bohemian Brands.
“Every single thing I’m like touching, I’m looking at, I’m sourcing,” Vernon told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While walking around the store, she is making micro adjustments to the mannequins and making sure a necklace is placed correctly from the vessel it hangs from.
“Love is in the details,” she said.
She is now two years into her first foray into brick-and-mortar retail, opening the Souk Bohemian on May 5, 2022, at 5:55 p.m. The number five has a deep significance to her, representing new beginnings.
The Souk Bohemian was supposed to be just a yearlong pop-up, but it turned into two stores, a five year-lease and soon, a new drinks and music-focused space at Ponce City Market.
Travel without a passport
Vernon moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles in 2009. Most of her family lived on the East Coast and she wanted to be closer to them but still be in a city rich in culture and creativity, so she decided on Atlanta.
Vernon co-founded The Bohemian Brands in 2017 after her first trip to Morocco. She was inspired by the country’s souks (markets), first starting an online store and running that for four years before moving into physical retail. But a place like Ponce City Market, which has retail giants like Nike and Sephora, isn’t an easy first brick-and-mortar foray.
It’s coveted real estate, but Vernon had a friend at Jamestown, the developer behind the market. It took a year of back and forth between Vernon and the company until she was able to secure the space, but because she had never had a store before, Jamestown let her in a pop-up at first.
The store in the space before the Souk Bohemian was a preppy men’s clothing store that Vernon described as “quite literally the opposite” of hers. But she and her team had just two-and-a-half months to get the space remodeled and ready to open.
It took 18-hour workdays and $90,000 to turn the 900-square foot space into the Souk Bohemian. She limewashed the walls to give them a chalky, weathered texture, and had a stucco fireplace built. She installed a shelf that reaches to the 16-foot ceiling filled with painted ceramics from Turkey. Vernon’s friend, a local artist, painted a linework mural in the changing rooms.
“We really just turned the space kind of into a completely different oasis from where it started,” Vernon said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Before opening her own boutique, Vernon was was a visual stylist for Bloomingdale’s for about 10 years.
Nine months after opening the Souk Bohemian, Vernon said she got a call that the space next door was available. After some renovations and decorating, which included bringing in a massive, five-foot tall vessel filled with desert grasses that took five people to carry into the space, Nomad opened in November 2022.
They performed so well, Vernon said, that she negotiated a five-year lease with Jamestown in 2023.
“Small businesses like Souk Bohemian and Nomad are an important part of the fabric of Ponce City Market,” Jamestown President Michael Phillips said. “They bring an element of discovery that we see as vital to creating interesting retail environments.”
The two stores are distinct spaces. Nomad leans masculine and genderfluid. It sells apparel, but many of its products are homewares — coffee table books, non-alcoholic drinks, stone shot glasses from Mexico.
Its signature oil has bergamot and oud notes versus the red currant and sandalwood of the Souk Bohemian, which leans more into the feminine and has teas, spiritual items like incense and palo santo alongside simple dresses, pants and cardigans.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Both stores are an expression of Vernon, who grew up sometimes leaning more of a tomboy, sometimes more into dresses. The design of the stores also reflects her vision; she said her home looks like what she brought to the market.
The stores’ tagline is “Where lifestyle meets leisure & culture meets curation.” She wants her stores to give customers a sense of travel without having to use a passport and a sense of discovery “like you are kind of treasure hunting.” She has sourced items from India, Peru, Portugal, Mexico, Turkey and more to fill the stores.
On a recent Saturday, Lisa Green, 72, from Palm Beach, Florida, was visiting her daughter. The two were shopping when Green smelled the Souk oil blend, prompting her to stop.
She bought an earthy cotton sun dress that she said she wouldn’t be able to find in Palm Beach stores, which are typically filled with floral and colorful prints. She said that she would visit again.
“It’s one-of-a-kind things and I like that,” Green said. “I like helping the little guy rather than going into the chain stores.”
‘A labor of absolute love’
Anahata Katkin, a local artist and store owner, met Vernon in 2016 after moving to Atlanta from Oregon. They had connected previously on social media and when Katkin came to the city, she asked to meet for coffee. Their friendship grew from there, connecting on their shared creative interests.
“She’s always been just such a force in terms of her eye and her curation,” Katkin said. “Her viewpoint has always been very magnetic.”
Katkin is also an entrepreneur and has worked in wholesale and retail for more than 20 years. She encouraged Vernon to open a store, knowing it would be an organic transition from online to a physical space. Katkin painted the linework mural in the Souk Bohemian’s fitting room.
“What Vanessa has done in being able to break through into the market of Atlanta, which is so prohibitive to small independent retailers … it’s pretty remarkable,” Katkin said. “Expect big things from Vanessa.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Atlanta took a few years to grow on Vernon, but now it’s a place she loves and her stores are meant to reflect that.
“When it came to opening our first space, a lot of people were like, ‘Well, why didn’t you open it in California? Like why didn’t you open it in LA or New York?’ And I was like, ‘Because Atlanta deserves to have beautiful spaces,’” she said.
Vernon said she continually updates her stores and merchandise and is working on a private label collection.
Her next venture she described as a listening room, teahouse and coffee shop, though she didn’t give further details.
Over the last two years, running the stores has been “a labor of absolute love,” Vernon said.
“There’s been so many lessons, hard ones, beautiful ones,” she said. “But I think every single day that I get to do the things that I love, no matter how much of a struggle it is, it’s worth it.”
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