Women of Western Wake: Mandy Becker

Mandy Becker was stepping off an elevator in Puerto Rico when a stranger stopped her. Although Mandy was thousands of miles from either of her stores, the woman clearly recognized her and said, “I just watched a video of you! I love your boutique.” Living, as Mandy puts it, “far away from San Juan,” the odds of running into a Swagger customer had felt close to zero.

Yet it wasn’t the only time she and the boutique have been recognized unexpectedly. A customer once spotted a former Swagger buyer in a European airport. A longtime boutique manager who moved away gets stopped to this day in and around Wilmington.

“Isn’t that crazy?” Mandy asks sincerely.

After all, it’s the kind of brand recognition most retailers spend decades chasing. Although Mandy started her business almost 25 years ago, it was influenced by an offhand comment she couldn’t fully appreciate at the time.

She was 22, fresh off an internship, and telling her boss she’d just accepted an engineering job at GE.

“You have too much swagger,” Mandy says he told her. “It’s not going to work for corporate America. You’re going to own your own business one day.”

He was right on both counts. Mandy took the GE job, cried many of her mornings there because she knew it wasn’t where she wanted to be, and within a few years had walked away to open her own business — one she’d name, in a nod to that unexpected compliment, Swagger.

Today Swagger has stores in Cary and Raleigh, a thriving online business, and a robust charitable giving tradition. Mandy and her team have helped find the perfect gift for, and dressed, countless women in all seasons of life and for all manners of everyday and milestone events.

Even before Mandy went to Georgia Tech to become a textile and fiber engineer, she wanted to open a gift boutique like the hometown one she’d always loved.

Describing how present-day Swagger differs from her early inspiration, she says, “This kind of trendy, affordable clothing store didn’t even exist in the early 2000s. My vision was just to sell gifts that made people happy.”

So she finished her engineering degree, married her college sweetheart, and took the sales job along the East Coast.

After two years at GE, Mandy told her husband what she really wanted. They were 25 and had no real commitments. It was 2002, in the middle of a financial crisis, and Mandy and her husband had no funding or clear path to a loan. That is until a Wells Fargo banker took a chance. “She was like, ‘I believe in you guys,’” Mandy says. “And the rest is history.”

The first tenant in what was then a newly built shopping center, Swagger opened as a gift shop in Lochmere Pavilion after a wine shop owner in downtown Apex, where Mandy lived, mentioned he was relocating there himself.

Sharon Mulgrew walked through those doors within Swagger’s earliest days and never really left. “Mandy is not just a store owner,” Sharon says. “For 24 years, she has been an entrepreneur, a supporter of shop local, a hostess to all who enter the welcoming doors of Swagger, and a trusted advisor. Mandy has a heart, and it always comes out loud and clear when you visit her well-respected business. I was her second customer in 2002 and remain her forever fan!”

The clothing side of the business came nearly a decade later, while Mandy was pregnant with her daughter, Kennedy.

Mandy accompanies her daughter, Kennedy, at Kennedy’s first Swagger photo shoot.

“The construction for the clothing addition took about two months, and all of our regular customers were awaiting the announcement,” she says. “But the day we officially opened, we just tore down the plastic separating the two spaces and told customers browsing the gift side to come on over.” Ten minutes later, the first piece of clothing was sold.

A Raleigh location at Quail Corners followed in 2017, timed deliberately to when Kennedy started kindergarten.

Today Swagger runs roughly 50/50 between gifts and clothing, and both locations carry nearly identical inventory, down to the item level. This decision was made early after Mandy learned how confusing mismatched stock is for shoppers.

Former manager Susan Rogers watched much of that growth up close. “Mandy has a real gift for seeing what’s next and knowing what women in our community are going to love before anyone else does,” Susan says. “Watching her grow two successful stores has been amazing.”

She remembers the leadership behind that growth just as clearly. “Mandy works hard, cares about her team, and is the kind of person who inspires you to do your best because you know she’s doing the same every day,” Susan adds.

When the boutique opened, Mandy called her parents in Georgia and asked them to move up and help run it. “My mom quit her job the next day,” Mandy says. Her father followed within the week. For nearly two years, it was just mother and daughter behind the counter.

“I’m the age now that she was when I started,” a reflective Mandy says.

The Swagger staff has grown into a multigenerational team spanning ages 16 to over 60. It’s an intentional mix, even if the all-female makeup happened organically. “Every age brings something to the table,” Mandy says. “It’s the perfect blend of seasoned experience and youthful perspective — the wisdom of those who have lived a little more life, combined with the younger generation’s pulse on the latest trends and enthusiasm for life.”

Mentorship runs through the culture. Mandy keeps in touch with former teenage employees who are now in their late 30s. One recently reminded her, over lunch, of the lessons she didn’t realize she had imparted. “She was like, ‘You taught me how to look people in the eye,” Mandy shares. “‘You taught me how to shake someone’s hand.’”

Some employees grew up quite literally inside the store. The current marketing manager once played in a gated kids’ area on the gift side as a toddler, long before she was hired. “There’s a lot of current customers who are now 30, 40 years old who shopped here when they were in high school, middle school,” Mandy describes. “They are now bringing in their children to shop, too.”

Hannah Altizer knows that trajectory firsthand. She started at Swagger at 14 — by far the youngest employee at the time — and worked under Mandy’s leadership for nearly 10 years. “Mandy took a chance on me that would ultimately shape the course of my life,” Hannah says. “She taught me so much about hard work, business, leadership, and character, but her greatest impact was the example she set for the kind of person I wanted to become.” That influence has outlasted Hannah’s time on staff.

Mandy traces a good deal of Swagger’s staying power directly back to the communities around its two locations. The original Cary store sits on the edge of a neighborhood that, in her words, “really wanted to see us succeed.” The Raleigh location has had the same experience with Quail Hollow, the neighborhood just behind it.

Mandy and the Swagger team celebrate the Raleigh location’s opening in 2017.

Nowhere has that support been more visible than at Swagger’s annual holiday open house. What started as a low-key celebration of the store’s November anniversary grew entirely through word of mouth into one of the year’s biggest local draws. It was a longtime customer who first suggested turning part of the event into a fundraiser for charity, an idea Mandy credits directly for the giving tradition that Swagger has continued ever since.

One of the accomplishments Mandy is most proud of is the endowed scholarship fund that Swagger established at Wake Tech. Helping to encourage the next generation of female entrepreneurs and business leaders, each year the scholarship is awarded to a woman pursuing a business degree.

Swagger’s legacy of giving supports the community that has carried the shop through hard stretches more than once. The store opened during a financial downturn, weathered another financial crisis less than a decade later, then faced the pandemic, and each time was able to rely on loyal, local customers to keep coming back. “We have just been super lucky throughout the years,” Mandy says. “Everyone cares, and you can tell they want us to succeed.”

Some of Swagger’s longevity Mandy credits to a bit of luck, but also to a philosophy that has remained unchanged since the beginning: offering stylish, quality pieces at accessible prices. Almost everything in the store is priced under $100. “It’s affordable,” she says simply. “I wanted to create a place where women could treat themselves without feeling guilty.”

But she’s just as quick to credit her staff, and a single rule she holds them to without exception: Tell customers the truth and provide the best customer service you can.

That honesty has become one of Swagger’s defining qualities. “The compliment we hear all the time is, ‘This is the only store where I feel comfortable shopping by myself because I know you’ll tell me the truth — you won’t just try to sell me something,’” Mandy shares.

“When someone comes out of the dressing room and asks, ‘What do you think?’ we tell the truth,” Mandy says. “If something isn’t flattering, we don’t say it is. It’s not worth making one sale if she goes home and someone she trusts asks, ‘Who sold that to you?’ Then we’ve lost her trust, and that’s something we never want to do.”

The other constant has been a willingness to keep adapting. Swagger’s earliest orders were placed by fax machine, back when reps arrived in person with paper catalogs and manufacturers didn’t have websites. Mandy has since built out an e-commerce operation, started live-selling before it was common — a decision that let Swagger keep operating without missing a beat when the pandemic hit — and experimented with nearly every social platform that’s come along since, keeping what worked and dropping what didn’t.

Mandy laughs as she recalls wondering, “Do we really need to be on Facebook?”

The younger generation, 14-year-old Kennedy, has already announced her intention to take over the business one day. “That’s at least another eight years,” Mandy says about a decision she doesn’t want to push on her daughter, “but if that’s what she wants, I know she’ll be great.” For now, the focus is on growing Swagger’s online reach rather than opening a third physical store. “The stores are a lot of work,” she admits.

Mandy is also candid about what leadership looks like day to day. For her, it means never being above the least glamorous parts of the job. She still works Saturday shifts herself and says, “I’m not afraid to clean the toilets, to take out the trash. No one’s above anything. And I think that also helps with the culture at Swagger.”

So it’s a strange thing, she admits, to be recognized by a stranger thousands of miles from home. But Mandy says the honor that means the most is the one rooted closest to home: a room full of the neighbors, employees, and customers who showed up for Swagger first, long before anyone in an airport ever knew the name.