The Seaside Style

The Seaside Style is the official lifestyle brand of the town of Seaside, and its main store sits at 121 Central Square, Seaside, FL 32459, open daily from 10am to 7pm. The brand did not start as a marketing exercise bolted onto a resort town. It grew directly out of the family that built Seaside itself: Robert Davis and his wife Daryl Rose Davis, who began developing the beachfront property Robert inherited from his grandfather into the walkable, New Urbanist town that broke ground in 1981. Daryl’s personal aesthetic shaped Seaside’s architecture and retail from the beginning, and that same eye eventually turned into a retail brand in its own right.

The now iconic SEASIDE tee traces back to the 1980s, when Daryl envisioned a farmers market as a gathering place for the young town and sketched out the first version of the SEASIDE logo for the occasion. By 1985 she was selling SEASIDE branded tees at that market, and they caught on immediately, popular enough that she opened Perspicasity, a European style boutique, to keep up with demand. In the 1990s she partnered with Erica Pierce to launch L. Pizitz as a retail anchor for the growing line of SEASIDE merchandise, and by 1992 Daryl owned the store outright, folding it into what became Seaside Associated Stores, the collection of shops that today includes The Seaside Style. The brand has since documented its own origin story in a book written by Daryl Rose Davis, tracing how one t-shirt design helped build an entire town’s identity.

Bud the Dachshund gives the brand its mascot and its warmest story. Bud belonged to Robert and Daryl during Seaside’s founding years, present around the earliest construction and the first version of the town square, and his silhouette eventually became a recognizable symbol across Seaside, appearing on merchandise and lending his name to the waterfront restaurant Bud & Alley’s. The original Bud lived to 21 years old, an unusually long life that only deepened his status as something like Seaside’s unofficial founding dog, and his legacy continues today through Bud III, known as Buddy, and a second dachshund named Guinness, both of whom show up across the brand’s newer products.

The current store carries far more than the original tee, though that shirt remains the brand’s signature piece and its best selling souvenir. Shelves hold sweatshirts, mock necks, sweaters, and hats alongside home goods like drinkware, candles, towels, and holiday ornaments printed with Seaside imagery. The brand has also built out a jewelry line in partnership with enewton, and it collaborates with outside labels including Weezie, Ellsworth & Ivey, and Chappywrap on limited items that carry the Seaside name into new categories. A family of stores throughout town, including the separate concept Cabana by The Seaside Style, gives shoppers multiple places to find the brand, but the Central Square location remains the flagship, the place where the whole story, from the 1985 farmers market to Bud the Dachshund’s silhouette, is on full display.

For visitors, buying a SEASIDE tee here is less about souvenir shopping and more about picking up a piece of the town’s actual founding history, made by the same family that laid out the streets around the store. Few beach town gift shops can trace a single product back to a specific market stall in 1985, let alone connect it to the very couple who designed the town’s architecture, and that history is what separates The Seaside Style from the generic beach apparel shops found up and down 30A.