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Frills • Taylor

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Written by Beth Wade Friday, 07 December 2007

Pharmacy gift shop grows into its own.

Before becoming a free-standing gift shop, Frills was a side venture of Mary Linda Hays and her husband, Harlan. After working in a different gift shop, she decided to add a gift shop to Harlan’s pharmacy, Hays Hometown Pharmacy, in 1995.

Ten years later, after selling the pharmacy, Frills took over the space and expanded into a full-size store.

“[Frills] is a collaboration of everyone that works here. They are very talented,” Hays said. “People are always telling me, ‘You have such an eye for things, or you do a good job,’ but it is not me. It is the women who work here, who I have been lucky enough to have come on board with me.”

Hays and her husband travel to market in Dallas at least four times a year and occasionally go to market out of state to New York, Atlanta and Las Vegas. Several of her staff members have also traveled to market to help select items for her store, she said.

“We try to find things that no one else in town carries, so that you have a bigger variety of things to shop for here in Taylor,” Hays said. “Everything that’s here, we’ve handpicked. All the gourmet products, we’ve sampled before we sell them here. The women who work here do the displays. [The women] are just the biggest part of this business.”

As a sponsor of Taylor’s, “Why Taylor? Buy Taylor” shop local campaign, Hays encourages residents to buy from stores in Taylor. Her business tries not to compete with other local vendors, she said.

“I try to incorporate things you don’t find anywhere else in Taylor,” she said. “When The Children’s Shop closed, we expanded our baby section. When another clothing shop closed, we added the clothing. We weren’t in competition with those stores before. We do carry costume jewelry and those kinds of things, but we don’t get into anything that would conflict with the local jeweler. We try really hard to bring in things that we need in Taylor.”

Each spring, Frills hosts a style show and luncheon that benefits the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. In October, the store hosted a garage sale that brought in $1,700 for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

“We try to do a lot of things that are community oriented and help the community,” Hays said. “We try to be community involved. I think the community is helping us to be in business; we need to give back to the community. If you live in a small town or any town, you need to give back. You can’t just live in it and not give back to it.”