In 2009, Rene and Jonathan Shapiro noticed a new trend in women’s fashion. They’d previously founded the upscale store Beautiful Girl in New York City and then, in the wake of the 2008 recession, noticed that shoppers were blending high- and low-priced items. In response, they founded Mixology Clothing Co., which mixed and matched price points.

The Shapiros had their sights set on the one store, but another family involved in the venture was growth minded. Gabrielle Edwards had worked at Beautiful Girl growing up; her father, Glenn Edwards, made a passive investment in Mixology; and her brother Jordan Edwards found himself doing things like building a website for the store. While Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were falling, consummate entrepreneur Glenn was pushing the Shapiros to expand, and Jordan found himself using his commercial real estate background to help build and open stores and run their teams.

The Shapiros retired from the business in 2019, and in 2024, Jordan is CEO and Gabrielle is president and head buyer of Mixology, which has 350 employees and 15 locations, including in Long Island, New York’s Woodbury Village, pictured at top. “All of her background and training comes off of the retail sales floor, so she is obsessed and passionate about clothing and fashion and trend,” Jordan said. “And I am very passionate about business, finance, leadership, banking and building things. Together we make a good, formidable team.”

Jordan talked with ICSC Small Business Center contributing editor Rebecca Meiser about what it’s like to work with family, how his background in real estate effects his role as a small business owner, and his hopes for the future.

Was your goal always to have multiple locations?

When the business was started in 2009, the goal was to have only one store. My father made the initial investment with the purpose of helping out our former business partners. Part of the reason they retired is that they never actually envisioned this big chain of stores. My dad has never had a single day of an operating role inside of Mixology other than being its chairman, but he has always pushed us for growth. That sentiment probably goes back to my dad’s dad. He would always say: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

How did you decide where to look for locations? Did you use market surveys?

A lot of our growth has been through friends and family and people demanding that we come to their towns. Today, while we’re not at the point of market surveys, we look for certain economic conditions when we’re investing in real estate, mainly population growth. And so the towns and communities that we open stores in are typically thriving and growing communities. On the heels of COVID, for example, 400,000 people fled New York City for the suburbs. I was one of those people. I had my second child. My wife and I had always planned on staying in New York City, and when COVID hit, we moved out to the suburbs of New York to Long Island with tens of thousands of other people just like us. Long Island and the suburbs around New York City in New Jersey and Westchester began to grow again. It created a good environment for opening up stores. We just opened our first location in Boca Raton, Florida, and [many] of the characteristics of the New York metropolitan area exist in the South Florida market.

You are still a relatively small business, but you’re in some great centers. What’s your process for pitching and finding spaces?

If [landlords] know about Mixology because they’re in the Northeast, it’s a lot easier, but when I was expanding down into Florida, it took me a good year-and-a-half to find a spot. It’s very hard to get into the best, Class A shopping centers because there aren’t that many vacancies, especially in the suburban markets, and they didn’t know me. I would go and pitch myself, and before I could even make a pitch, they would have already had the space leased. I was very lucky to be connected through a very good relationship I have in the Northeast with one of my favorite landlords, Edens. Vice president of leasing Lesley Dokos introduced me to [her] account counterpart down in Florida and gave me a little bit of a push to help me get into my first lease in Lakeside [Centre] down in Boca Raton. Working the channels and networking with people in the industry has been very, very powerful for me, and now that I’ve developed some great relationships with landlords like Basser-Kaufman and Edens, it’s making it better for a little bit of national expansion.

I always tell landlords: “I want to be your best and favorite tenant.” I now have a 14-and-a-half year track record of making sure that my rent is paid on the first of every month or before. A landlord myself, I have over 400 commercial tenants around the country. I work with other small retailers like myself all the way up to national credit tenants, banks, supermarkets, dollar stores and everything in between. I always do my best to make sure that I’m the easiest tenant that adds a lot to the shopping centers. That has helped me immensely because I can’t tell you how hard I had to fight to get into Class A shopping centers and I sometimes still have to go and sell myself and show them that Mixology is going to be a huge benefit to them. I’m proud to say that in many cases, we’re one of the best tenants in the shopping center on a sales-per-square-foot basis.

What is your ideal size and location? What do you like to be next to?

The perfect Mixology is 2,000 square feet. We love to have at least 20 feet of frontage. We’re trying to find spaces in Class A lifestyle shopping centers. I always say that Mixology goes great with exercise and iced coffee. I love being next to a Whole Foods, and I love to be amongst other fashion retailers: footwear, accessories and apparel. It creates a really good destination.

You recently moved from 1,200 square feet in New York’s Rye Ridge Shopping Center to a 2,000-square-foot spot in the same property, even though you’d recently renovated the smaller space. What went into that decision?

When you have a great shopping center like Rye Ridge, vacancies might only come up once in a decade. We had the rare opportunity to move into a bigger space, and we jumped on it. But you’re threading the needle when you’re looking into growth: It could be tempting to want to get a bigger, better space, but the benefit of a smaller space is it’s less expensive and less rent. We found [that] with the right size store, it’s just like a shoe: If it’s too small, you have no place to grow into. We’ve been very tempted to go larger — we could probably do really well on the 3,000- or 4,000-square foot [range] — but right now, 2,000 square feet is the perfect size for us.

Where do you want to be in five years?

In five years, I hope to do in South Florida what we’ve done here in New York. We have 15 brick-and-mortar stores and a warehouse and headquarters here in the New York metro area. In five years, we could have 15 or more Mixology stores between Coral Gables and Palm Beach, Florida. It’s a very similar market, similar density, similar population. And I hope to infill more in the Northeast Corridor, as well, so we hope to have between 30 and 50 stores.