Brody Brothers Dry Goods

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

Brody Brothers Dry Goods Company, Inc.—better known to shoppers as Brody’s—grew into an eastern North Carolina department-store institution. Its roots reached back to Hyman Joseph Brody’s 1917 Sumter, South Carolina shoe-store venture, while Leo Brody established the North Carolina operation in Kinston in 1928.

The family expanded the business as a traditional full-line department store, selling apparel, shoes, accessories, cosmetics, and the assorted necessities that made a serious shopping trip feel like an expedition. A Greenville store opened in 1938; Greenville later became the chain’s historic headquarters.

Brody’s added stores across eastern North Carolina, including locations in Greenville, Rocky Mount, Kinston, Goldsboro, and New Bern. In 1973, the family-owned retailer acquired Cohen & Sons Clothing. By the late 1990s, it operated six mall stores—an era when the department-store anchor still had enough gravitational pull to rearrange a Saturday.

In 1998, Proffitt’s acquired Brody’s and converted the stores to the Proffitt’s name. The retail banners changed, naturally, because retail history rarely lets a good storefront sign retire quietly.

Our Brody Brothers Dry Goods collection celebrates the polished, practical department-store spirit of the Carolinas: family retailing, mall-walking mileage, and the satisfying certainty that somebody in the building knew where the good shoes were.