Longtime Wilmington car dealer Bruce Cavenaugh recently sold his Market Street property to national firm DriveTime and is retiring from the business. Cavenaugh, a Wilmington native who will be 70 in August, started selling cars in the Port City in 1973, he said, starting his own business in 1990. In the midst of the Great Recession, Cavenaugh shut down his deale ...

A Wilmington resident recently opened a CBD shop on Castle Street, where she has planned a grand opening Sunday.  Kim Skidmore has been welcoming customers to LIV CBD at 320 Castle St. as part of a soft opening for about a month. Born in Philadelphia in 1982, Skidmore moved to Wilmington in 2002. She worked in a medical clinic as a client liaison and b ...

For Angela Bobal, COVID-19 resulted in a very soapy 2020. The owner of artisan boutique Grit & Grace ended up making nearly 40,000 bars of soap last year after implementing Facebook Live sessions at her store in Mebane on Friday nights. Bobal (pictured below) is in the midst of opening a second location in Wilmington of Grit & Grace, which was founded in Meba ...

A local store at Mayfaire Town Center in Wilmington has moved to a much larger space on Main Street.  My Sister’s Cottage is now in a 1,600-square-foot portion of 5,000 square feet at 6869 Main St. “The option to have a bigger storefront with better exposure and having it be more open was just phenomenal,” said Britteny Bellinger, who had opene ...

It’s a hot market for sunrooms these days, said Taylor Waddle. Waddle and her husband, Tom, bought Wilmington firm Porch Conversion, a company that turns patios, porches and unused outdoor space into three- and four-season sunrooms, in January. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed. The couple now owns the business and its nearly 15,000-square-foot fa ...

Since she left the corporate world less than 10 years ago, Diane Hodapp has been on a roll.   Finding herself with a wide range of choices for a new career, Hodapp was riding her bike near her Carolina Beach home one day when she said to herself, “Why not a bike shop?” Selling bikes would, she thought, offer a product the beach market needed and draw on ...

Granted, the indoor section of The Transplanted Garden makes for tight quarters, but the expansive, plant-filled grounds are a social-distancing dream. That’s likely a big reason that the Wilmington business at 502 S. 16th St. has had sales “pretty much where they should be” in recent months, according to co-owner Tom Ericson. A few blocks over, the Hi ...

The predictions have come true: early this fall, retail analysts foresaw that this year’s pandemic restrictions would drive even more holiday shoppers online, and that more gifts would be exchanged remotely as many families and friends gather virtually rather than in person.   All of which means that shippers are deluged with cards and packages, with online or ...

From retail to a new salon, Wilmington continues to gain new businesses despite the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In downtown Wilmington, more businesses have opened during the pandemic than have closed, and downtown consumers are still coming in, said Dane Scalise, board chair of Wilmington Downtown Inc. “Many people have suffered personally and profe ...

Signs on the facade of The STEM Labs at Mayfaire Town Center were gone Tuesday. Tina and Brad Catalone of The STEM Labs announced the closure of their educational center at 820 Town Center Drive in a recent email to customers. The Catalones had no further comment on the closure Tuesday morning. The doors were locked and a "closed" sign was hanging in the wi ...