Sunset Shoes & Lifestyles

Sunset Shoes and Lifestyles is a footwear and lifestyle boutique in WaterSound Town Center offering a curated selection of comfortable, stylish shoes and accessories from trusted brands. The WaterSound store on Hub Lane is one of the newer additions to a Northwest Florida retail story that stretches back nearly three decades, and it carries the same easy, beach-ready philosophy the brand built its name on along 30A.

The company traces back to Eddy Hardy, who started selling shoes as a high school student in Dothan, Alabama, and went on to run his own stores in Selma, Demopolis, and Ozark in the early 1970s. After closing those Alabama shops and relocating to Panama City, Hardy stepped away from the shoe business for more than a decade before returning in the mid-1990s, when he discovered a wave of European comfort brands and opened Nu Shoes in Panama City Beach. He launched Sunset Shoes in Destin in 1997 with his wife, Mary Hardy, and his daughter, Joy Hardy, joined the family business that same year to help run merchandising and store operations, a partnership that still shapes how the company buys and displays product today.

Sunset Shoes has a reputation for being first to market with several comfort brands, having introduced Birkenstock, Naot, and Mephisto to Northwest Florida before most other regional retailers carried them. That early bet on comfort footwear grew into a broader lifestyle retailer: the company expanded from shoes into swimwear, sunglasses, handbags, and apparel, and opened a flagship store at Grand Boulevard in Miramar Beach in November 2020 as part of a lineup that now spans several Emerald Coast locations, with the WaterSound Town Center shop continuing that expansion further east along 30A. Eddy Hardy has summed up the approach simply: “We are a full-service shoe and lifestyle store. A lot of businesses have gotten away from that philosophy, but our customers appreciate it. They want quality.”

Inside the WaterSound store, shoppers find a wall of brands built for walking the beach and the boardwalk in equal measure: Birkenstock, Hoka, On Running, UGG, OluKai, Reef, Rainbow Sandals, Hey Dude, Dolce Vita, and Mephisto sit alongside comfort-focused labels like Donald Pliner and Gabor. The lifestyle side of the store rounds things out with Hammitt bags, Yeti and Stanley drinkware, Melin hats, Sun Bum sun care, and apparel from brands like Free People and Southern Shirt, so a single stop can outfit a beach day from footwear to sunscreen. Staff lean on decades of fit experience to steer visitors toward the right sandal or sneaker for sugar sand and long days of exploring 30A, which is exactly the kind of full-service approach Hardy built the brand around back in 1997.

For anyone stocking up before a week on the Emerald Coast, or replacing a pair of flip-flops that did not survive the trip down, the WaterSound Town Center location puts nearly thirty years of shoe expertise within an easy walk of the rest of the center’s shops and restaurants. It is a practical stop as much as a browsing one: comfort brands like Mephisto and OluKai are built to handle both sand and pavement, which matters on a trip that might include a boardwalk stroll one day and a bike ride the next. And because the store sits inside a walkable retail district rather than a standalone strip mall, a visit here pairs naturally with grabbing coffee, picking up groceries, or catching a bite at one of WaterSound Town Center’s restaurants on the same trip.