Shopping in Jacksonville Beach

The staff at Sports Mania, a locally owned athletic shop, stocks its shelves with a wide array of sneakers and fan gear. Feet find sanctuary in shoes by Nike, New Balance, and ASICS, and jerseys adorned with gators, bulldogs, jaguars, and narwhals advertise college-team pride. With the beach located only blocks away, patrons can easily slip on their new footwear and go jogging in the Atlantic breeze.

Rosenblums expert clothiers outfit clients in high-end name-brand threads made from quality materials, fitting fashionable men since 1898 and chic women since the 1960s. The Tory Burch collection features handbags ($185+) that elegantly dangle from shoulders, and Trina Turk ($118+) and Theory ($215+) ornament ladies with various styles, whether they need work-appropriate attire or contemporary, playful prints for dinner dates and dressing mannequins after hours. Wardrobes take kindly to shirts from Ike Behar ($135) and Robert Talbott ($135+), and elevator doors stop politely when obstructed with shoes from Donald J Pliner ($225+). The storefront's made-to-measure consultants will counsel male clients on custom casual or dress wear, measure individual dimensions, and help to choose materials from the Sartorial Collection. In addition, the team can craft personalized flourishes in each garment—from precisely lengthening sleeves to stitching adhesive nametags into breast pockets. Rosenblums also proffers a lifetime of expert alterations in case any attire loses its fitting.

Head pro Bob Mattiace edifies club-toting clientele with golf wisdom gleaned from more than 30 years of golf experience and a professional career that’s highlighted by six tournament championships. As pupils pulverize dimpled orbs inside the studio’s state-of-the-art golf simulator, Bob sizes up swings with the help of the machine’s advanced tracking technology, which unveils crucial information such as swing speed, swing path, club-face position, and whether your 9-iron is actually a sledgehammer. Bob pinpoints bad habits and offers corrective advice to cure chronic shanks, slices, and snap hooks, and the simulator displays a visual illustration of each swing to help pupils more easily iron out technique wrinkles. Each Groupon buyer can opt for a private lesson for a half-hour of one-on-one feedback, or share a lesson with a friend, spouse, or argyle-clad mannequin with a couples lesson.

RockAWay Garden Center

Originally opened in 1981 by Greg and Veronica Burghardt, the RockAWay Garden Center is now tended to by the couple's sons, Greg Jr. and Brian, who draw on their childhood gardening experience and a pair of Rutgers University degrees in plant science and landscape design to nurture the verdant nursery. The nursery blooms with Florida-friendly vegetable plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs, and arms gardeners with a full line of Dr. Earth organic soils and fertilizers. During the Yuletide season, a tree lot teems with Fraser, Douglas, and Concolor firs from the family's upstate New York farm. RockAWay's team of landscaping specialists installs professional arrangements for home yards, customizing designs to best complement a customer's style or collection of He-Man garden statues. True to its mission of promoting local gardening, the center partners with Seabreeze Elementary School to lead students in nurturing herbs, vegetables, and plants in their school's greenhouse.

Aio Wireless is the brainchild of Jennifer Van Buskirk. In a former life, she acted as Senior Vice President of Mobility Strategy for AT&T, where her performance earned her enough trust from the higher-ups that they asked her to run their new company: Aio Wireless. Her new joint venture retains all of the reliability of AT&T's 4G/LTE network, but gives folks a chance to break free of contractual shackles with a pay-as-you-go plan. In fact, the whole process has been streamlined. Aio lets clients use their own cell phone rather than buying a new one with unlimited talk, text, and data plans.

Despite the cutting edge gadgetry and the reliable network, however, the stores' approach to technology is more than just practical. Their array of phone cases, for example, brighten iPhones, Galaxies and Lumias in neon hues. Their earbud headphones, meanwhile, let phone owners play their tunes on the go without schlepping their tuba everywhere.

"Never, never, never give up," is the driving mantra for David Oreck, who flew combat missions with the US Army Air Forces in World War II and returned home to build a business empire from scratch. He set out to design a machine to lighten hotel employees' load, making a lightweight vacuum cleaner as opposed to the traditional bulky, burdensome commercial cleaners. Naturally, the domestic market began clamoring for his high-powered yet easy-to-handle devices, and soon Oreck vacuums could be found in homes throughout the country.

Today, the company continues its tradition of innovation, simplifying household tasks with Steam-Glide mops for hard floors, HEPA-filter upright vacuums, and stain-killing cleaning products. Oreck's commitment to clean sends it headlong into the future, with high-tech air filters that react to their environment with automatic sensory controls, filtering odors, allergens, and curse words.