What it’s actually like
Most of Old Town’s shopping is aimed at adults on vacation. Garage Boutique & Concept Store is aimed at their children, and it does not dumb anything down. The shop sits in Suite 110 at 7144 East Stetson Drive, on the Southbridge stretch a few doors from the canal, and it carries designer clothing for boys and girls from baby to size 16: Fendi, Stella McCartney, Dior, Lanvin, Balmain and Scotch & Soda, mixed with domestic designers the owner finds herself.
The owner is Katie Wilson, who has run the shop for more than twenty-five years by its own account. Her stated aim is high fashion with a rock-and-roll edge, and the tagline on the door of the website, “Timeless. Tailored. Tiny-Teen.”, is a fair summary of the range. This is not a toy store with clothes. It is a fashion boutique with smaller hangers, and it is priced like one.
The shop’s reputation was made long before Southbridge’s current lineup. Phoenix New Times named it a Best of Phoenix winner four years running, from a 2007 award for the best place to buy a baby gift for an edgy friend to Best Boutique for Kids in 2008 and 2009 and Best High-End Boutique for Kids in 2010. In those years the paper described a shop at the back of a small Stetson center called The Mix, with a candy bar for the kids while the parents browsed.
What to buy
A designer baby gift. The smallest sizes are where the big houses are easiest to give, and the shop’s original award was for exactly this.
A special-occasion outfit. Weddings, holidays and portraits are what the designer rails are for, and the owner knows which pieces photograph well.
Something from a domestic designer. The hand-picked smaller labels are the pieces you will not find at Fashion Square.
An accessory for an older kid. The rock-and-roll end of the range, for the tween who has opinions.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Stetson Drive has almost no parking. Use the Waterfront garage across the canal and walk over a bridge, or the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side and walk a block north. With a stroller, the Fifth Avenue side is the easier approach. The Southbridge guide covers the block, the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district and the Old Town on foot note maps the loop. This is the canal end of Stetson, not the bar blocks east of Scottsdale Road; the Stetson Drive lexicon entry explains the difference.
The shop lists hours of Monday through Saturday from 10 to 5 and Sunday from 10 to 3, so it is a daytime stop. Mornings are best with small children, before the heat in summer and before the lunch crowd on the patios in winter. The holiday season, from November’s Canal Convergence through December, is when the occasion wear moves fastest.
Next door in Suite 100 is AMY Atelier, the contemporary women’s boutique, which makes the address a two-stop morning for a family.
Eat while you’re there
Barrio Queen has a big canal-side patio and a menu children can navigate. Marcellino Ristorante is the handmade-pasta room on the same row, and The Ends is the newest restaurant on the block. Across the water, Olive & Ivy is the Waterfront’s patio for an easy lunch.
How it got here
Stetson Drive was a service street behind Fifth Avenue until 1997, when Cowboy Ciao opened on it and the canal end of the street became a destination. Through the 2000s the block filled with chef-driven restaurants, and the small storefronts around them filled with independent shops that wanted the foot traffic the restaurants brought. Garage was one of them, a children’s boutique that decided luxury kids’ fashion was worth a store of its own in a city that mostly bought it at the mall.
The idea worked. By the late 2000s Phoenix New Times was handing the shop an award a year, and its write-ups set the scene: a sparkly room at the back of The Mix, a small center on Stetson, with designer pieces in children’s sizes and a candy bar to keep the customers’ children occupied. Developer Fred Unger was building Southbridge around the restaurant row at the same time, wrapping the south bank of the canal in residences and independent shops.
The block has been through a lot since: the recession that followed, the closing of the original Kasperski restaurants in 2018 and the Southbridge Two tower fight of 2019 and 2020, which ended with Stetson staying low. Today it trades as Garage Boutique & Concept Store from Suite 110 at 7144 East Stetson Drive, still owned and run by Katie Wilson more than a quarter century after she started, by the shop’s own count.
In a district where retail leases turn over faster than restaurant ones, that is a long run. It makes Garage one of the older independent shops on the canal bank and a fixed point in the 2020s Old Town that is otherwise changing around it.