For as long as most people can remember, Opelika Main Street handed out exactly one downtown business award each year, tucked inside the city's larger State of the City event like a footnote to municipal business. This month, that changed. The organization held its first-ever standalone Downtown Awards Social, a dedicated night built solely to recognize the people running the storefronts on First Avenue, Railroad Avenue, and 8th Street. Four businesses walked away with new honors. But the more interesting story isn't who won. It's what the four winners have in common: every one of them is plowing money back into the same six or seven blocks rather than expanding outward.
That's not how downtown growth usually works. Cities court a big developer, land an anchor tenant, and call it revitalization. Opelika's version looks different this year, built by a bakery that outgrew its kitchen, an ice cream cart that never left, a bridal shop that bet on 8th Street, and a wine shop that showed up and immediately started pulling weight. Add a hundred-year-old cotton warehouse that opened in February as a nonprofit movie theater, and you get a downtown whose growth is coming from the inside out.
Here's who took home the four inaugural awards:
- Business of the Year: Stinson Breads
- Spirit of Opelika Award: O Town Ice Cream
- Downtown Impact Award: Bella's Bridal
- Rising Star Award: Sante Wine Shop
Kelsey Sullivan, Opelika Main Street's executive director, put it simply when she said "Downtown Opelika is successful because of the incredible people who invest their time, talent and resources into making it a place where people feel connected." Walk the district block by block and you can see exactly what she means.
The Bakery That's Outgrowing Its Own Storefront
Stinson Breads started the way a lot of neighborhood favorites do: in a home kitchen. Founders Anna Claire and Matthew Stinson began baking sourdough in 2019 and selling it through weekly bake sales and local bread drops before opening a permanent storefront at 714 N. Railroad Ave in 2024. The growth since then has been fast enough to raise eyebrows. In the storefront's first year, sales grew 434%. Through the fall of 2025, they were up another 288% on top of that, driven in part by partnerships with 20 local restaurants, coffee shops, and breweries that now serve Stinson bread and pastries alongside their own menus.
That trajectory is why the bakery is now expanding into a 3,500 square foot facility around the corner on First Avenue, a project Matthew Stinson has confirmed is still on track for later this year. It's a meaningful jump from a single storefront to a dedicated production space, and it means the bread showing up at two dozen other local businesses is about to be baked at real scale, a few doors from where it started.
The Ice Cream Cart That Became a Fixture
Long before Stinson Breads had a storefront, O Town Ice Cream was already downtown, just in a different form. Owners Angela and Chris George started as a mobile ice cream cart popping up around downtown more than a decade ago. They never opened a big brick and mortar flagship or expanded into a chain. Instead they became one of the district's most consistent presences, the kind of business that shows up to support other people's events as often as it hosts its own.
That's exactly why Opelika Main Street gave them the Spirit of Opelika Award this year, recognizing the business's role in promoting downtown and its community-first mindset rather than its size or sales figures. In a district full of expansion announcements, O Town's honor is a reminder that staying small and staying visible counts as its own kind of investment.
The Bridal Shop That Bet on 8th Street
Bella's Bridal took the opposite approach: it made a big, visible commitment the moment it arrived. The Downtown Impact Award recognized the shop for a significant physical investment in its new space, the kind of renovation that improves not just one storefront but the whole block around it. Opelika Main Street credited Bella's Bridal with adding, in their words, "a bit of sparkle to the corner" of 8th Street from the day it opened.
That distinction matters for anyone who's watched older downtowns struggle to fill their historic buildings. A tenant that renovates rather than just occupies is doing double duty, running a business and restoring a piece of the district's building stock at the same time.
The Newcomer Already Pulling Its Weight
Sante Wine Shop is the youngest of the four winners, and its Rising Star Award reflects that. The recognition wasn't for longevity or square footage. It was for how quickly the shop became an active part of the downtown business community after opening, turning into a welcoming stop for both residents and visitors in a relatively short window. It's the kind of award that signals Opelika Main Street is paying attention not just to who's been around the longest, but to who's integrating fastest.
A Hundred-Year-Old Warehouse Becomes a Movie Theater
None of the four award winners are the newest thing to open downtown this year. That distinction belongs to Boxcar, a nonprofit microcinema at 706 1st Ave that opened its doors in February. The building itself has a longer history than any business currently inside it. Constructed in the early 1900s as a cotton warehouse, it later housed a string of other tenants, including a refrigerator repair shop through the 1970s and '80s, before sitting largely dormant.
Boxcar is run by Bay Kelley and Jeff Bennett, who founded the Opelika-Auburn Film Arts Collective in 2021 after years of hosting pop-up screenings at The Jailhouse in Opelika. The collective's growing following convinced them the area could support a permanent home for arthouse film, live music, and visual art under one roof, and the result seats between 50 and 80 people with tickets running $5 to $10, all volunteer-run, all nonprofit. Since opening, Boxcar has hosted everything from silent films with live musical accompaniment to community partnerships with groups like Alabama Arise and the League of Women Voters.
It's a different kind of investment than a bakery expansion or a bridal shop renovation, but it follows the same logic. Someone looked at an underused building on First Avenue and decided the answer was to put something new and specific into it, rather than wait for someone else to.
What This Actually Tells You About Downtown Opelika
Put these five stories next to each other and a pattern shows up that no single press release captures. Downtown Opelika isn't growing because a big outside developer picked it. It's growing because the people already running businesses there keep choosing to expand in place: a bakery moving its production a block over instead of relocating to a bigger city, a bridal shop sinking money into 8th Street instead of a strip mall, a film collective restoring a warehouse instead of building new. Even the newest arrivals, like Sante Wine Shop, are getting folded into that same rhythm within months of opening.
Opelika Main Street says the Downtown Awards Social will become an annual tradition. If this year's winners are any indication, next year's list will look at a district that's still being built by the people already standing in it.
If you're the kind of person who likes watching a downtown grow one storefront at a time, keep an eye on First Avenue this fall. And if you ever want to talk about what any of this means for property values, buildable space, or what's happening on the residential side of Opelika and the surrounding communities, Tiffiney Graham is always glad to talk shop. Let's Connect.
