Sylvia Davis did not set out to open a store 10 years ago.
She and her husband Barry were driving past a strip center on Topside Road in Louisville one Saturday, noticed some home goods displayed out front and pulled in out of curiosity. The shop inside was rarely open and by chance she learned the unit next door was becoming available.
“I had no clue that I wanted to open a business when I walked in there,” she said. “It was just curiosity.”
She walked out, got in the car and told Barry a unit was opening and asked if he knew who owned the building because she wanted to open a store. Just hours later, Barry talked with building owner John Loope, and Sylvia had her first storefront with an official opening in May 2016.
Ten years and two addresses later, Louisville Mercantile — the gift, home décor and consignment shop Davis built from a single rented unit — will mark its anniversary with a celebration on May 16.
Davis credits her longevity to community focus, financial discipline, an outstanding team and a willingness to admit what she doesn’t know. She’ll also tell you with a laugh, there was a fair amount of luck. Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently found that roughly half of small businesses do not survive past five years. Louisville Mercantile has now doubled that mark.
From billions to boutique
Davis spent her career in institutional administration, moving from the State of Tennessee budget office through the Tennessee Board of Regents and the University of Tennessee before landing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in a strategy role. She had managed departments with 250 employees and overseen budgets measured in billions.
None of that prepared her for retail. She had no storefront experience, no social media presence and no background in buying or inventory. What she had was a creative streak — years of craft fairs, flea market booths and festival tables — and a philosophy she had carried through every job she’d ever held.
“Throughout my life, doors have opened and I’ll just walk through,” she said. “I don’t know what’s on the other side, and great things have happened.”
In those early days at 2940 Topside she was still commuting to Oak Ridge, working the store on weekends while a neighbor handled weekdays. Her first customer, Joyce Vandiver of Maryville, wandered in before the official opening and asked if she could shop. She is still a customer and friend today.
Building slowly, then all at once
Growth at Louisville Mercantile came in stages, each one tied to an opportunity rather than a master plan.
In 2017, a neighboring unit at 2940 Topside came open and Davis took it, nearly doubling her floor space. Retirement from Oak Ridge in 2018 freed her to expand further, and that June she opened a second location in Maryville. By sometime before July 2020, she had added a third unit at the original Topside strip center, eventually opening the connecting doors to create a single space across all three units.
Then she started thinking bigger.
In March 2023, Davis purchased a parcel that would become 2801 Topside Road — a property that required an environmental study, resolution of an abandoned utility line, a railroad right-of-way acquisition and a TDOT application just to establish a Topside Road entrance. She engaged DIA Architects in May, secured town planning and design approvals by October, demolished the existing house on the property in November and completed site work through early 2024. Construction began in April.
Even before the building was finished, the property was generating business. Louisville Books and Antiques opened in May 2023 in the previously owned family body shop at the rear of the lot, operated by Charlene Smith — the woman who had sold Davis the land — making Davis a landlord and adding a second retail destination to the site.
She closed the original 2940 Topside location in April 2025, moved everything to the new building and opened to the public in May — nearly a decade after that first curious pull into a parking lot that started the whole adventure.
“I never envisioned day one that this is where we’d be on day 3,650,” she said.
The lessons that took nine years to learn
Davis is candid about what she knew she should do but implemented later than she would have liked.
She spent years running on instinct and feel rather than diving deeply into the data analytics, keeping product lines she loved past their useful life and tracking metrics in far less detail than she does now.
That shift came through her work with Wendy Batten, a retail-focused business coach based in Canada whose mastermind group includes shop owners from across North America and beyond. Batten pushed Davis to think of herself not as a store operator but as a CEO — someone responsible for strategy, systems and team development, not daily operations.
When tariffs created uncertainty in purchasing in February 2025, Davis responded by scaling back order quantities and sourcing more deliberately rather than absorbing higher costs. Her buying team represents three generations, which also gives the business an advantage. When Davis, longtime employee Emily Duggan and Bridget Griffin go to Atlanta market together, they pull in different directions on product, and Davis has learned to trust those differences rather than override them.
“Some of the things that Emily would pick out, I would never pick out,” she said of the much younger team member. “But I value her insights and she’s right, they sell.”
Community as strategy
Perhaps the sharpest insight Davis has developed over a decade is that community and commerce are not competing priorities.
When the COVID-19 pandemic closed in-person retail, Louisville Mercantile pivoted to live selling on Facebook — going live to show customers new products, letting viewers comment to claim items, then invoicing and shipping later. The approach built relationships with buyers across Tennessee and beyond, people who had never set foot in Louisville. Eventually many of them did.
That instinct — treating customers as community rather than transactions — runs through everything Davis has built. Classes, carefully curated furniture and home consignment opportunities, support for local makers, and a declared motto of community over competition are the heart of her business. In fact, she argues, it is local retail’s clearest advantage over the internet and the big-box store.
“How you make people feel welcome,” she said. “I think there’s all kinds of opportunity in that.”
Advice for someone starting out
Her advice to someone sitting on a business idea is practical: research it, protect yourself financially, hire the right people for the right jobs, and treat location as one of the most consequential decisions you will make for a brick-and-mortar business. For example, moving three-tenths of a mile down Topside Road, she says, changed everything for her business.
As for what really explains a decade of survival, Davis offers a theory and then subtly subverts it.
“I’m blessed,” she said. “But yeah, there’s been a little luck along the way.”
