SouthPark Sit-down: Laura Vinroot Poole
August 30, 2024
Over two and a half decades, the enterprising boutique owner has experienced highs and lows. Through it all, she remains steadfast in championing Charlotte and building a brand that’s bigger than herself.
by Natalie Dick | photographs by Richard Israel
Laura Vinroot Poole is well-known in the international fashion world, but don’t call her a fashionista. While the Queen City native travels the globe curating pieces for her luxury clothing boutiques Capitol, Poole Shop and Tabor, her passion lies not with the industry but with the people.
“I don’t have a huge interest in fashion,” she tells me. “I am very interested in people, supporting them, and making them feel beautiful and confident.”
In fact, she doesn’t consider fashion as her true occupation.
“That’s the vehicle, but I believe in wearing the things you feel great in. That varies for every single person.”
And it varies for each occasion. We meet for lunch at one of her favorite “old Charlotte” spots, Arthur’s in the Belk department store at SouthPark Mall. Poole exudes subtle sophistication, dressed in a Charvet men’s shirt and hand-embroidered Pero coat, her blonde hair pulled back in a perfectly imperfect twist and wearing minimal makeup. Humble and approachable — inviting even — Poole has a gentleness that immediately puts one at ease.
“I grew up coming to Arthur’s. This is where we would go after school in junior high when I was at AG (Alexander Graham Middle). We would hang out in the mall, and then come here for something from the grill and fries,” she says nostalgically. “I still run into people from my childhood here. It just feels like home.”
Hometown pride
Poole is immensely proud of her hometown and feels a deep commitment to helping preserve the past while working to shape its future. That ethos has been passed down in her family, starting with her grandparents.
“It’s a real American dream story,” Poole explains. “My grandfather immigrated from Sweden during the Great Depression, and my grandmother grew up on 36th Street in NoDa in an old mill house and took the trolley to work at a textile mill. My dad was the first in his family to go to college.”
Her father, Richard Vinroot, was a prominent political figure from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. Now retired, he served eight years on Charlotte City Council followed by two terms as mayor before running for governor in 1996, 2000 and 2004.
“I grew up feeling like anything was possible and that this city could be anything we wanted it to be because I saw all the people around me doing that… making it that. I lived across the street from Hugh McColl; the house behind me was Harry Dalton, who arguably built The Mint Museum into what it is today.”
Her parents instilled in their three children a strong sense of civic duty. Poole’s mother, Judy, passed away in March after a long battle with breast cancer. Poole gave her eulogy.
“My siblings and I came from extraordinary people,” she tells me, wiping away tears. “My parents believed in serving this city and its people, and making things better than how they found them. It’s a lot to live up to, but I’m proud to come from people like that, and I’m doing my best to carry it on.”
One way she does that is by acting as a de facto ambassador for Charlotte through her business. “I have always seen that as my job. It is all about this sort of import and export of culture. We’re taking in beautiful things from all over the world, but in the process, we’re also sharing with designers who our client is, what she appreciates, what she loves, what an incredible city we live in, and how lucky they are to have their clothes in our city.”
International designers and press have taken note. Poole regularly hosts in-store events designed to nurture relationships between the industry’s most coveted designers and her A-list clients. Her boutiques have been featured in Forbes, Vogue, Town & Country, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few.
“Mr. McColl has said to me several times, ‘It’s important to have you here, because when we’re recruiting people to this city, this is one of the things that makes it a world-class city,’” Poole says.
Beyond selling Charlotte through her business networking and travels, Poole is involved with numerous local philanthropies. She serves on the board of Communities in Schools and is a staunch supporter of Opera Carolina, The Mint Museum, Baby Bundles, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and Wing Haven.
“I love that Charlotte has always had this can-do spirit, that we support each other. I do worry about the growth. We’ve always been this progressive city — we’re trying to reinvent ourselves, we’re always trying to be better, striving for more. There’s something beautiful about that. It’s exciting, but we need to make sure it is smart growth.”
An unlikely path to fashion
Poole’s entrepreneurial success didn’t happen overnight. She attended Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools through ninth grade before leaving home at age 15 for boarding school in Massachusetts. An outgoing student with an appreciation for art, Poole felt no particular calling to fashion in her formative years. Looking back now, it’s clear she had a natural talent for styling and a penchant for quality clothing.
“I was a kid who always helped ‘fix’ my mom’s friends. I would style their shawls and pin their brooches in a better place. That was my only fashion background. That, and I was a big thrift-store shopper. I was a regular at the Junior League Thrift Store. It taught me so much about fine fabrics, tailoring and the proper construction of garments. I was also a VIP client at Montaldo’s clearance rack,” she tells me, referring to the ladies specialty shop that closed in the mid-’90s. “Some of the best pieces in my closet now are from there!”
Her college years got off to a rocky start, with Poole deciding to take a pause after her freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill.
“I found it hard to assimilate after leaving home and North Carolina at the start of high school. I felt like I had seen and done so many things, then to go back to the way it was before, there were all these expectations and pressures to be who people thought I should be. I needed a year to unravel and unwind and figure out what I wanted to do.”
When she returned, she withdrew from her sorority, became an art major, and began following her heart rather than conforming to social pressures. This newfound perspective and the confidence she gained from it would significantly shape who she is today. After graduating from UNC, she met her husband, Perry, in Raleigh. They eloped when she was 25.
“It was really radical at the time. I didn’t know anyone else who had done it.” Poole tells me with a rebellious grin. “At the time, my dad was running for governor, and I didn’t want a 500-person wedding. I wanted something more real. My dad cried for a year every time he saw me, but as time went on and we went to more weddings, he would say, ‘you were so smart to have eloped and understand that getting married is a promise to God and a solemn thing. It’s not a show.’”
A year later, the couple moved to Charlotte so Perry could study architecture at UNC Charlotte. Poole was still searching for her professional purpose, which would soon reveal itself and set in motion an exhausting and exhilarating two and a half decades.
Why not Charlotte?
“It started really because it bothered me that my mom’s friends were traveling to other places to shop,” Poole says, as we continue our conversation in Arthur’s new wine bar on the main level of Belk.
“They would go to Bob Ellis in Charleston for their shoes, Mom would go to New York twice a year to shop at Saks or Bergdorf Goodman, and they would go to Neiman Marcus in Atlanta. It seemed odd that all these big corporations and Bank of America (then NationsBank) were based here, with people traveling worldwide to do business, but they didn’t have anywhere to shop for the proper wardrobe for those trips.”
So in 1998, Poole and her husband opened Capitol in an 800-square-foot space at Phillips Place. The luxury clothing store offered pieces found nowhere else in the South, along with personalized styling services.
“We had zero money, nobody funded it, we just worked incredibly hard,” she says. “We built the store out on our own, painting the walls and making it up as we went along. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we always believed in Charlotte.”
While Poole’s name recognition and connections helped launch the business, her unique brand — and her eye for fabrics and patterns with a feminine-yet-statement-making feel — propelled it. Clients say she has an uncanny sense of what works best for them, and her dedication is unmatched. A full-service boutique, Capitol’s employees do it all, from packing clients for trips, pulling complete outfits, accessorizing — even making dinner reservations.
“I love serving people, supporting them, helping them feel their best and to be able to do their job without worrying about how they look,” she explains. “Clothes are our armor. It’s the first thing that people see and the first thing that people know about you. It’s what you’re communicating to the world about who you are, where you’ve been, what you believe in… You communicate a lot without saying a word.”
Personal and professional challenges
As Capitol’s reputation grew, Poole opened a sister store, Poole Shop, after relocating to a standalone, 6,000-square-foot building near the corner of Colony and Sharon roads. Housed on the second floor above Capitol, Poole Shop features contemporary designers and more relaxed silhouettes. In 2015, the couple opened menswear store Tabor in a cool cottage in Eastover. Then, just before the pandemic, Capitol opened a second store in Santa Monica, California. The same year, Poole launched her successful podcast, “What We Wore.”
“It’s not a glamorous business. Working hard and becoming successful is not an easy process, and it’s not a linear process either. It’s zig-zag all over the place,” Poole says, adding that being an entrepreneur comes with high highs and super-low lows. Over the years, Poole has faced her fair share of personal and professional challenges.
“I’ve had many businesses that I created fail, and they’ve all been great learning experiences,” Poole says. Those include a Lilly Pulitzer shop that lasted only one year and an e-commerce business she co-founded called House Account. “Hardships and challenges make you who you are. I have a bachelor of fine arts in painting and never went to business school, so I think real-time failures were necessary to gain knowledge and understanding of what I needed to do next and where I needed to be. I have zero regrets.”
When the recession hit in 2008, it looked as though Capitol might become her next failed venture. Determined to keep the store afloat, Poole ignored the advice of her then-CFO to lock the doors and never return.
“I got up every day and went to work. I just kept going back, and eventually, we got into a better position. That’s when I saw just how much I was willing to do. I didn’t know my strength or my will or my resolve until those years.”
But her resolve would be put to its toughest test yet in November 2021, when Poole was diagnosed with breast cancer. With a family history of the disease and watching her mother fight it three times, Poole says she “felt like she’d been trying to outrun it for a long time.” At 49, she underwent a double mastectomy and breast-reconstruction surgery. She spent three months at home with her husband and teen daughter while she recovered.
“I think it was one of the first times in my life that I was able to receive love and receive support, and to be able to sit with that and not ‘do’ through it,” she tells me. “I have boxes and boxes of notes from friends, clients and people I didn’t even know. It’s a testament to this business, this community of women clients, my team, designers and everyone in this industry… And for somebody who dropped out of the sorority, I always think that’s funny because I have the biggest sorority in the world with this circle of women that’s held me up and pushed me forward.”
Taking a step back
Cancer-free for nearly three years, Poole describes herself these days as “way less stressed out.” She has a peaceful air about her, a contentment that radiates from deep within.
“I’m enjoying leading my team and guiding them, but I’m not in the middle of it anymore. I’ve learned to step back even more than I did before to let my team learn and grow.”
As we near the end of our lunch date, I ask her what success means to her now. Her first response is succinct: “To me, the biggest measure of success is still being in business.”
We sit in silence for a few seconds before she continues. “From the beginning, I knew for it to be a successful business it couldn’t be about me. It was at first, because that’s all anyone knew. All along the way, I’ve tried to take steps back to make it an entity of its own, an energy of its own, [to ensure] that it survives without me, no matter what. I want it to be a gift to all the people who work in it and shop in it. I want it to be a place that gives back to everyone.” SP
TAKE FIVE
Comments have been edited for length.
Hobbies: I am crazy, bananas over gardening. I got into it while recovering from my breast-cancer surgeries. It’s the only place my phone doesn’t exist. I’m not sad. I’m not stressed. It’s a place where everything disappears. I know nothing about it, and I’m not good at it, but I love learning about it and failing and succeeding.
Favorite art form: My husband is an architect, and I love architecture. When we travel to different cities, we often visit famous midcentury or modern buildings or “brutalists.” I love to understand how people live within spaces.
What is something you wear that would surprise people? My favorite things to wear are navy cashmere sweaters, navy corduroys, vintage Levi’s or my husband’s old shirts.
What’s the biggest fashion offender today? Wearing workout clothes outside of workouts. Being able to see every part of someone’s body — we don’t need to share that. Some things should be reserved for the workout class or at home.
Fall fashion trends: Trends are moving away from quiet luxury and toward things that are more special, more embellished, embroidered, and more one-of-a-kind. People are choosing quality over quantity.
