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View ProfilesPublished February 7, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
All eyes were on Averie Brown as she stepped onto the circular platform in front of the large, gold-framed mirror. She wore a strapless bridal gown, the fourth dress she'd tried on.
Before anyone in her entourage said a word, her future mother-in-law, who had been dabbing tears since the second dress, gushed a sigh of approval.
"What do you think, Ave?" the bride's mother asked.
"I like it," Averie said. Vining appliqué covered the bodice and spilled down the skirt onto the train.
"Will you turn a little bit?" someone asked.
Close-set, satin-covered buttons lined the back. "Oh, my gosh," the mother-in-law-to-be said. "I love that." She reached for more tissues.
On a January Saturday — with seven assorted relatives and a friend in tow — 21-year-old Brown, an East Montpelier native, was shopping for her wedding dress at Needleman's Bridal & Formal in South Burlington. Racks of wedding gowns separated the party from the bustle at the front of the store, where bridesmaids shopped, high school girls tried on prom dresses, and men and boys got measured for suits and tuxedos.
The family-owned business, now in its 100th year, may be the oldest bridal boutique in the country to be continually owned and managed by one family, said Peter Grimes, publisher of the magazine Vows: The Business of Bridal.
The business started in Newport, where it has operated continuously since 1925, and now has two locations. A strong work ethic, integrity and top-notch customer service are the pillars that Mark Needleman cites for sustaining the company through three generations. Mark, 54, and his wife, Heather, 51, are the current owners. Like his parents and grandparents before them, he and Heather run the business together. They work in the South Burlington store. "There's an owner here all the time," Mark said. A pair of best friends runs the Newport store. One has been with Needleman's for 22 years, the other for 11.
Dressing men and women for formal occasions is Needleman's niche. The aptly named family has surfed the waves of silk, satin and taffeta as bridal gown trends have come and gone. Sleeves, long and short, disappeared to make way for sleeveless and strapless dresses. Ball gowns with full skirts slimmed to body-skimming styles — some with lace panels and slits to the thigh — as Cinderella dresses ceded to sleek and sexy. When matching the color of bridesmaids' shoes to their dresses was the thing, Mark's parents, Marvin and Carol Needleman, sat on the floor on weekends, dying pumps. If a bride wanted her shoes embellished like her dress, Carol stitched on beads. When After Six's "Miami Vice" line of tuxedos hit the runways, in the mid-'80s, Needleman's snagged them so Vermont grooms and their coteries could walk down the aisle in the pastel palette favored by the TV detectives.
Ten years ago, when the internet flexed its brick-and-mortar-crushing muscle to become — and remain — the store's biggest competitor, Needleman's continued to do what the dot-coms cannot: professionally fit a tuxedo, calm an anxious bride, outfit a crying teen when the prom dress she ordered online fails to arrive on time.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mark and Heather shut their doors and waited. When allowed to reopen, they admitted one bride at a time and steamed every dress she tried on.
Demographics have presented another challenge. The country's marriage rate has largely declined over the past four decades. The average bridal store has been in business between 25 and 31 years, a Vows subscriber survey shows. Needleman's survival, publisher Grimes said, "is quite extraordinary."
Over time, the business has moved, added and closed locations. For six years, it was in Newport, St. Albans, Barre and South Burlington simultaneously.
Needleman's started with Mark's great-uncle Louis Needleman, the oldest of 10 children reared in Brooklyn, who traveled around New England selling boots and other merchandise out of a station wagon in the 1920s, Marvin Needleman said. "And when my uncle was driving through northern Vermont, he came across this town on a gorgeous 33-mile lake, most of it in Canada, which is Lake Memphremagog."
Newport, eight miles from the border and the last railroad stop before Canada, bustled with travelers from Boston. "It was just a beautiful spot," Marvin said. "My uncle fell in love with it." He bought a department store "and decided to get out of his Ford station wagon."
The store, American Clothing, sold men's and women's wear on Main Street. Louis recruited his youngest brother, a longshoreman, to help in 1925. Ed Needleman, Marvin's father and Mark's grandfather, soon became Louis' partner.
In 1936, the year Ed married, he and his wife, Martha, started a women's clothing store, also on Main Street. "The day they opened, they sold every dress in the store," Marvin said. Twenty-seven years later, in 1963, Marvin joined the business. He married Carol the next year, and she joined, too.
A number of moves — all within Newport — and the addition of a store called Jeans All followed. Needleman's began focusing on formal wear in the early '70s, when fraternal organization Order of the Eastern Star selected the store to supply gowns for its formal events statewide. The shop dressed women "from one end of Vermont to the other," Marvin said, and Carol "put her heart and soul" into formal wear. Customers came from Canada, St. Albans, Burlington and Morrisville. "So it grew, and it grew by word of mouth," Marvin explained. At one point, the store mailed a gown to Bangladesh.
The Needlemans' third or fourth move landed them in a two-story space in Newport, and they made the lower level a bridal shop. They installed red carpet and a chandelier. On Saturdays, eight to 10 brides shopped at the same time.
By the time Mark entered the business, Needleman's sold exclusively formal wear. He graduated from Saint Michael's College in 1993 and started the Traveling Tuxedo Team, delivering tuxedos from the Newport store to homes and hotels in Chittenden County. He brought along a seamstress, who made alterations on the spot.
In 1994, he opened his own store in St. Albans and persuaded Heather, then his girlfriend, to work there. In 2005, when Mark heard that chain stores David's Bridal and Men's Wearhouse planned to open in Chittenden County, he got there first, opening a store on Shelburne Road. He viewed the big guys less as competitors than business boosters. They would attract customers who would check out his store as well, he reasoned, saying, "Then it just becomes who has better customer service." David's Bridal closed last year. Men's Wearhouse operates in Williston. Needleman's has moved to Dorset Street.
The store sells and rents suits for funerals, but mostly, it's in the happy-occasion business. Traffic was steady on the Saturday Averie Brown tried on wedding dresses. Heather had a full slate of bridal appointments under the chandelier in the back of the store.
Up front, fueled by a protein bar and a Dr. Pepper, Mark fitted men for suits. He greeted members of Brown's party as they arrived. Just behind them, he spotted three teen girls in the parking lot, one wearing a North Country Union High School sweatshirt, heading for the store.
At schools with fancy proms — North Country, BFA-St. Albans and Colchester — the word is out: Needleman's gets its first shipment of prom dresses in January. And the store records which dress has been purchased for which prom, so as not to sell duplicates.
But Needleman's, which has seen too many $400 dresses abandoned on dressing room floors, requires girls shopping for prom to be accompanied by an adult, and the three girls approaching the store were alone. Mark, himself a North Country grad, knew they had driven two hours from Newport for the South Burlington's store's larger selection. Even before they got inside, he knew he would bend his rule. "Take your shoes off," he told them. (The store has a no-shoes policy to help keep formal wear clean.) "We're going to help you out."
He welcomed them into the dress lovers' dream closet, where Bellows Free Academy-St. Albans senior Cora Thomas, accompanied by her mom, stood before a mirror and repeatedly ran her hands over the smooth red satin dress she was considering. "I can always tell when a girl likes a dress, because she pets it," manager Kate Maxson said.
Needleman's sold 500 prom dresses last year, he said. Women's formal wear accounts for roughly one-third of the store's annual sales. Bridal gowns and bridesmaid dresses account for another third; menswear makes up the rest.
Both stores require appointments for bridal dress shopping, a pandemic practice the owners decided to keep to provide better customer attention, Mark said.
For an hour, Brown was center stage on the dais under the parasols dangling from the ceiling while Heather helped her narrow her choices. Brown will marry 22-year-old Kirt Menzi of Horseheads, N.Y., on his family's dairy farm on August 17. Her mother, grandmother, future mother-in-law, sisters, aunts and a friend sat in the upholstered chairs ringing the viewing area. They offered opinions on each dress she tried, both verbally and with the little handheld signs the store provides, which bear messages such as, "Ooh! La La," "Love it!" and "Next please!"
Kim Brown, the bride's mother, was chastised for liking everything — "Mom, you can't put up 'It's gorgeous' for every one!" Averie's older sister, Macenzie Brown, said — while the bride's younger sister, 13-year-old Emarie, was accused of liking nothing.
"No!" Emarie protested. "I liked the one before the last one."
Averie had arrived with no particular style in mind, she said. Keeping track of everything she tried on — the dress with the lines, the one with more sparkle, the summery chiffon one — was hard enough. And the feedback she got was, at times, confusing. A dress Averie declared her current favorite garnered these reactions:
"It's really, really sweet on top."
"No, I'm still back at the third one."
"I like the one before the last one."
"No, the third one back is her second now."
Brides typically shop at four to six stores before selecting a dress, Vows publisher Grimes said. Needleman's was Averie's first stop and, roughly an hour after she started looking, Averie had found "the one." She picked a dress with floral appliqués and shimmering crystals and pearls. It was the dress that had made her cry.
The original print version of this article was headlined "For Better, for Years | Three generations of Needlemans have dressed Vermont bridal parties"
Tags: Business, Love & Marriage Issue, Needleman’s, Mark Needleman, wedding dresses, formalwear, suits, dresses, Needleman's Bridal & Formal, Needleman's Bridal & Formal (Newport), Needleman's Bridal & Formal (St. Albans)
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