The general store where every gift does good
On St. Michael Street in downtown Mobile, a few steps off Dauphin, a storefront with a hand-painted mural reading “Good things are in store” has become one of the city’s most distinctive places to shop. Do Goods Mercantile Company, opened in October 2022 by Annie and Christopher “Chops” Persinger, is an upscale general store with an unusual business model: every product on the shelf comes from a company that exists, in some concrete way, to help people.
The idea began at Christmas. The Persingers, raising five children between them, decided a few years back to buy their Christmas presents only from companies that leveraged their businesses for good — brands with mission-driven projects — and the list kept growing. “The list of do-good companies just grew and grew,” Annie says. What began as a shopping rule became a business plan.
From an idea to a St. Michael Street storefront
The family’s path to retail ran through adoption. While going through the adoption process, the Persingers learned the scale of the need — by widely cited estimates, some 153 million children worldwide need loving homes — and the reasons children lose parents: poverty, trafficking, addiction, exploitation. Shopping mission-driven companies felt like too small a response. “We wanted to create a place where we could support something we cared deeply about, and we wanted to draw the community in as well,” Annie says.
In 2021 they found a building for sale in downtown Mobile, bought it, and began the renovation with contractor John Thomas of TMC Remodelers. The buildout got a creative boost from Courtney Hilley, creative director at Bellum, and her husband Christian Hilley, the photographer and graphic designer; Andy Scott of New Hand Signs painted the mural on the side of the building. Annie also wanted her children to see a business idea carried from sketch to storefront. “We set out to launch a business that would convey our core principles of helping others.”
Along the way the couple leaned on Mobile’s small-business infrastructure — the Innovation Portal and the Small Business Development Center at the University of South Alabama, where Mel Washington worked with them on the launch. “Mobile is resource-rich,” Annie says.
A story behind every shelf
The inventory is researched one company at a time, and the stories are the point. One supplier employs women emerging from hopeless situations to make products from recycled plastic containers. Another recycles goods and employs residents of transitional housing. Ramson Ministries in Mobile, run by Matt Armbruster, works with men coming out of incarceration and homelessness. Closer to the family, the store carries trucker hats from Oowee Products, the Asheville, North Carolina company run by Annie’s nephew Gabriel Hargett, which employs adults on the autism spectrum to make its leather goods.
Buyers will find barbecue sauce, vintage briefcases, pocket knives, leather goods, blankets, dopp kits, candles and travel bags sewn from repurposed military fabric by a company that supports military families. At checkout, every purchase comes with a card describing the impact of the items inside it — a “layered way of doing good,” as Annie puts it.
Downtown’s generous spirit
The store trends a little masculine in its merchandise, but the range is broad, and the owners have made the room comfortable for browsers — right down to two leather chairs for shopping companions. Each month Do Goods hosts a walk or run at the store with a local nonprofit, a format popularized on Allison Gaillard’s podcast “Run Your Story”: participants gather at the store, run or walk, then return to shop while the nonprofit tells its story.
The partnerships run both ways. “By partnering with nonprofits, we get to educate our shoppers about the work they do, and they often, in turn, educate their supporters about what we are doing too,” Annie says. Even competing retailers have sent customers her way. “There is a generous spirit in downtown Mobile.”
The store’s website now sorts its whole inventory by cause, so shoppers can see exactly what their money supports. But the simpler version of the pitch works too: walk into 202 St. Michael Street, find something you would have bought anyway, and leave knowing it went further than a receipt. In a downtown that has rebuilt itself around local businesses, Do Goods Mercantile may be the purest expression of the idea.