Shopping in Doral

Chris and Karen Williams combined more than 25 years of optical experience when they created Specs Appeal Optical and furnished it with designer frames and experienced eye-care professionals. The boutique's hand-selected licensed opticians and sales staff treat each pair of eyes that wander in through the door with absolute care and attention. The team works together by first providing eye exams and then helping direct clients to the frames best suited to their face shape and personal style. Customers select frames from among such sought-after brands as Chanel, Gucci, Prada, Ray-Ban, and Oliver Peoples. Those interested in contacts can park themselves at attractive rosewood stations where they can get fitted with contacts or evaluate their ocular swag in the desktop mirrors.

Praised by the Miami New Times as 2010's Best One-Stop Art Depot, Jerry's Artarama is a sprawling 20,000-square-foot artists' oasis with a bounteous inventory of creative supplies. Aisles teem with the store's own proprietary product lines such as SoHo and Creative Mark, alongside imported products from around the world acquired through Jerry's relationships with international manufacturers. The store also stocks specialty and hard-to-find items that are rarely carried by large chain stores, such as specialty brushes for portraitists and extra-wide forks for professional mashed-potato sculptors.

The siren call of allCanes' massive collection of Miami Hurricanes clothing, memorabilia, and accessories entices not only fans to wander its spaces, but also pro athletes of the past and present. Since converting from a sporting goods store to a Hurricanes-only shop in the mid 80's, football greats have brought family and friends to outfit them in green and orange. NFL players, such as Willis McGahee and Ken Dorsey, walked between racks of gear where greats including Warren Sapp, Ray Lewis, and Jessie Armstead once signed autographs.

While big name players may draw crowds, it's allCanes' stock that wins the day. From the front door to the back wall, every inch of wall, shelf, and rack space teems with Hurricanes apparel from brands such as Nike and My U. Hurricanes baseball caps line racks set in between panoramic shots of the stadium and beanies, while racks hold popular fan t-shirts, such as "The U Invented Swagger." In all, around 1,000 UM-related items call the shop home during football season.

Flamingo Road Nursery owner Jim Dezell is used to the surprise on people's faces when they come to the nursery for the first time. "People commonly come in and say, ‘Wow, I never knew there was a garden center like this,’" he says. Maybe they're wowed by the park-like landscaping, complete with display gardens designed to inspire shoppers with ideas for plant combinations. Maybe they're blown away at the fountains, statues, and thousands of pieces of pottery. Or maybe they've just seen the pond surrounded by colorfully painted "shops" and palm trees. It's a "true experience" that's as much about shopping as it is about creating "memory and traditions", wrote Today's Garden Center in 2011, when it picked Flamingo Road Nursery as the most revolutionary garden center in the nation. In addition to helping shoppers navigate the selection of flowers, trees, and other plants, the knowledgeable staff can also help them complete landscaping projects with outdoor artwork, waterfalls, and more. "It's professional advice here," says Jim. "We really try to understand our customers' needs and offer solutions that will both excite them and provide long-term enjoyment." He even recommends people bring in dimensions and photos of their space so the staff can get a better idea of what will grow well there. The staffers can even come to homes to install everything once it's purchased. Other garden-centric items, such as Big Green Egg barbecues, give customers more chances to enjoy their updated outdoor spaces. To help home growing projects succeed, one staff member, Jodi (who Jim calls their "garden gal") gives weekly talks on growing your own food at home without the hassle of planting notoriously difficult hamburger bushes. The nursery also hosts an on-site Farmers Market shop, which hosts a large assortment of fresh fruits, vegetables, and artisan foods—some of the produce is even picked at the nursery itself. On the weekends, a beekeeper visits the store to explain how bees make honey to visiting kids, using the in-store observation beehive as a teaching tool. The nursery holds seasonal celebrations as well, including an annual fall festival and a Christmas festival replete with sleigh rides, Santa visits, and a Christmas tree forest.

At each Big Frog Custom T-Shirts & More location across the United States, professional graphic artists print high-quality, custom designs onto a variety of products including men's and women's T-shirts and sweatshirts, toddlers' onesies, and clothing for canines. Rather than ironing or screenprinting its tees, the team uses a process called direct-to-garment printing, dying images directly into fabric to ensure that the garments won't crack, fade, peel, or develop a sense of self. The staff also eschews harsh chemicals in favor of environmentally friendly ones, such as water-based ink.

The artists price their products at a consistent rate, don't charge setup fees, and won't increase their costs, even if the desired artwork is highly complex, demands hourly compliments, or requires multiple colors. They'll happily print either a customer-created design or one of their own onto one or 300 T-shirts at once, and they turn around most in-stock items in 24 hours.

The friendly sleep specialists at Brickell Mattress help to match slumberers to the mattresses that best meet their individual needs. On arrival at the store, customers can relax in the coffee lounge and read up on all the latest celebrity-mattress news, compliments of the store's free WiFi. Brickell’s knowledgeable, bilingual staff—all of whom have five or more years of mattress-matching experience—then whisk patrons about the showroom, showing off the extensive selection of memory-foam, latex-foam, water, and air mattresses. Additionally, customers enjoy a 30-day comfort guarantee that ensures if a mattress is not satisfactory, it can be exchanged for different model with no questions asked.