Banana Bart’s Beckons Browsers With Style and Color
By Leah Stratmann June 5, 2003 Issue

It’s no accident that along with hand made signs indicating the distance to exotic ports, there is one sign showing the distance to Tuscaloosa, Ala., the place where the collaboration of Anne and Bart Coleman first began.

Anne and Bart met while students at the University of Alabama. Bart is a Birmingham native while Anne was raised in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In college, Anne majored in art while Bart concentrated on finance. When Banana Bart’s was first born in 1985, it was the perfect merger of two areas of expertise coming after years of trying to figure out just what it was they wanted to do.

“When we graduated from college, we went to Sun Valley, Idaho. It was so different from the climate we knew, but we both loved to ski, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Bart worked as a bell captain and I was working in a deli. We got to ski all we wanted, but after a few years, we decided we needed to get in real life. Bart went for a master’s degree in hotel administration at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and I went to work for a regional airline.” The airline job and the resulting free flights fueled the travel junkies to explore as much as their budget would allow. They still love to travel and they love to travel together.

Bart soon became disenchanted with the depth of knowledge he was gaining in school and became a casino croupier for a few years. Anne departed the airline and was a photographer at Caesar’s Palace. As they worked and saved money, they purchased a house on Bay Drive in Fort Walton Beach and made the move.

“We sat on the beach the first summer trying to decide what we wanted to do. At that time, there was not a store in Destin where a person could buy a spatula, so we opened The Nautical Chef across the street from where we are now. We sold things people might need for cooking on boats. One day I put some earrings on the counter and they sold in two days and it just ballooned from there,” Anne recalled.

With her children Carter and Kelly often in a playpen on the front porch, the couple began to expand the merchandise. As they prospered, so did Destin and they soon outgrew the space they were in and in 1993 purchased the present location overlooking the Destin Harbor.

“The structure we are in was the first vacation house in Destin. Holiday Isle (visible across the Harbor from the parking lot) was literally a cow pasture, complete with grazing cows” Anne said. “For two years we operated both stores. At that time we could safely run back and forth across U.S. Highway 98, but we sure couldn’t do that now!”

These days, Bart and Anne combine their love of travel by visiting international markets where they buy the goods for the store. They travel to markets in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, and San Francisco. “Half the stuff we want is never delivered because the seller has problems getting the merchandise through customers,” Anne said. “We get about six boxes a day with merchandise from all over the world and over the years we’ve had incredible luck in choosing the items. A person can purchase an item for 35 cents or $350 and get a really cool thing for both prices.”

The store is jam packed with stuff, but there is order to the chaos. Local artists craft the ceramic art in the store. Anne says she would like to represent more local artists, but felt the artists often price themselves out of the market. “Almost all of the metal art and papier-m‚ché is from Haiti,” she noted.

Both Bart and Anne say that one of the reasons they love the work is the view and the customers. “People on vacation are happy and the job is not stressful,” Bart said. Certainly at first glance, it would be hard to see two people so relaxed while working.

“The whole store is done in themes. We have the sea life area, the earrings with stones and the area we call the sparkly area. Bart put the front door where it is because he was gonna make the customers look at the harbor whether they wanted to or not.”

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