Gwynn's started in 1967 as a 600-square-foot women's shop. Fifty-nine years later, the family finally has a King Street address.
Gwynn's on King opened Oct. 29 at 154 King St., the Post & Courier reports. It's the second store for the luxury department store that has called Mount Pleasant home this whole time. Founders Gwendolyn and Norris Ward sold the business to their daughter and son-in-law, Lynn and Marshall Simon, in 1990, and the Simons built the 20,000-square-foot store at 916 Houston Northcutt Blvd. in 1992. Madison Simon, Marshall's daughter, is the third generation.
What they chose to put downstairs is the tell. The paper says the ground floor carries, for now, Brunello Cucinelli for men and women plus some fine jewelry. That's it. Gwynn's own site lists Pomellato and Kwiat as the jewelry names.
Mount Pleasant is the big store, with Tom Ford, Tory Burch, Jimmy Choo and a beauty counter. Downtown is edited down to basically one label.
Upstairs is where the money gets made. Gwynn's and Charleston Magazine both describe a second-floor salon with private shopping suites and a full bar. Gwynn's also offers same-day delivery for locals and will drive you between the King Street and Mount Pleasant stores. That's a department store acting like a private club.
The block helps. The Post & Courier puts the store across from Croghan's Jewel Box's new spot and a half block from American Garden, a short walk from Charleston Place. Marshall Simon paid $3.1 million for the building in December 2024, per the paper's read of county land records, and told the paper he'd been hunting for a second store for about 20 years.
Then there's the shoe.
During renovation, an old woman's heel fell out of the rafters. It fits a well-documented habit: people hid single shoes in walls and under floors for luck and protection. The National Building Museum found a whole collection of them in its own 1880s building in Washington. The Post & Courier reports historians date the Gwynn's heel to roughly the 1890s to 1910s and tie it to the family of Patrick Coogan, a city assessor and later city treasurer who owned the building.
The Simons put it back. The shoe now lives behind glass, tucked into a little nook in the wall, and Madison plans to tuck a heel of hers in there too, with a note for whoever finds it in a hundred years. She broke her wrist slipping in heels the same day the first shoe story ran, the paper reports, so nobody can blame her for wanting the extra luck.
One sad footnote. Norris Ward died July 3 and Gwendolyn Ward died Sept. 12, according to the Post & Courier, months before the downtown doors opened.
Gwynn's on King is at 154 King St. Go see the shoe. Maybe skip the heels.
Sources: Gwynn's (history, ownership, Mount Pleasant store, brands, King Street salon and services), Charleston Magazine (address, salon and bar, brands), the National Building Museum (concealed shoe tradition) and the Post & Courier (opening date, ground floor, purchase price, neighbors, the shoe's history, the Wards)
