By Natalie Dick
Laura Vinroot Poole is well-known in the international fashion world, but don’t call her a fashionista. While she travels the globe curating pieces for her luxury clothing boutiques Capitol, Poole Shop and Tabor, her passion lies with people, not the industry.
“I don’t have a huge interest in fashion,” she says. “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.”
Poole’s success continues a family history for which she is immensely proud. The Vinroots are “a real American dream story,” she explains. “My grandfather emigrated 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, is a retired lawyer and former two-term Charlotte mayor who ran for governor three times.
Growing up near Charlotte icons Hugh McColl Jr., Harry Dalton and others, “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,” she says.
Poole parlays her business to serve as a de facto ambassador for Charlotte. “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. Her boutiques have been featured in Forbes, Vogue, Town & Country, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few. McColl, the city’s most famous leader, credits Poole’s shop with helping give Charlotte a world-class credential.
UNLIKELY PATH
Poole attended Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools through ninth grade before leaving home at age 15 for boarding school in Massachusetts. She felt no particular calling to fashion, but 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” at the Junior League Thrift Store and Montaldo’s clearance rack, she says, referring to the ladies specialty shop that closed in the mid-’90s.
Poole took a pause after her freshman year at UNC Chapel Hill, needing a year to “figure out what I wanted to do,” she recalls. When she returned, she withdrew from her sorority, became an art major and began following her heart.
After graduating, she met her husband, Perry, and they eloped when she was 25.
“My dad was running for governor, and I didn’t want a 500-person wedding,” she says. “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.
WHY NOT CHARLOTTE?
“It started really because it bothered me that my mom’s friends were traveling to other places to shop,” Poole says. “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.” Executives at Bank of America and other big corporations in Charlotte were traveling globally for business, but “they didn’t have anywhere to shop for the proper wardrobe for those trips.”
In 1998, Poole and her husband opened Capitol in an 800-square-foot space at the Phillips Place retail center near SouthPark Mall. The 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 connections helped launch the business, her eye for fabrics and patterns with a feminine-yet-statement-making feel propelled it. 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 says. “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.”
PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGES
Poole later opened a sister store, Poole Shop, after relocating to a standalone, 6,000-square-foot building in southeast Charlotte. Housed on the second floor above Capitol, Poole Shop features contemporary designers and more relaxed silhouettes. In 2015, the couple opened the Tabor menswear store in the Eastover neighborhood, where Poole grew up. Just before the pandemic, Capitol opened a second store in Santa Monica, California.
“Working hard and becoming successful is not an easy process, and it’s not a linear process either. It’s zigzag all over the place,” Poole says. “I’ve had many businesses that I created fail, and they’ve all been great learning experiences.”
Failures include a Lilly Pulitzer shop that lasted a year and an e-commerce business. “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.”
The recession of 2008 was a particularly challenging time. Poole ignored the advice of her then-CFO to lock the doors.
“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.”
Her toughest test came in November 2021, when Poole was diagnosed with breast cancer. 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 says. “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.”
Cancer-free for nearly three years, Poole describes herself these days as much less stressed. “The biggest measure of success is still being in business,” she says. “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.” ■
A version of this story previously appeared in BNC’s sister publication, SouthPark.