In Business of Home’s series Shop Talk, we chat with owners of home furnishings stores across the country to hear about their hard-won lessons and challenges, big and small. This week, we spoke with Ann Yancy, the founder and principal designer of lighting fixtures company Ro Sham Beaux, who owns shops in both Charleston and West Palm Beach.
We reached out to Yancy in late January, just days after she’d opened the Florida location amid a historic winter storm along the East Coast that sent temperatures below freezing even in West Palm. Thankfully, the cold has not kept new customers home. With the launch under her belt, she was thrilled to discuss the future of her business and her creative output, both of which have taken many twists and turns over the last three decades. Ahead, the designer—known for her instantly recognizable hemp-wrapped, beaded light fixtures—discusses pivoting to what sells, the candy-store appeal of her boutiques, and the difficulty of convincing people to spend four figures online (yes, even designers).
How did you get your start in design?
I’m a Tennessee–North Carolina girl originally, and moved to Charleston with my parents. I grew up in a manufacturing family, so I knew I wanted to start my own business and be a designer of some sort. I thought I wanted to be a sculptor, and moved to New York City. That morphed into jewelry design, and then slowly, by the late 1990s, it turned into lighting.
Back then, I was doing mostly custom work directly with architects and designers. When I left New York in 2000 and moved back to Charleston, I continued my lighting career and was [working with] a lot of restaurants. I was a metalsmith, a sculptor, a welder. I used to do a crazy amount with goatskin. Then I had a couple of children and wanted something that was steadier, so I launched Ro Sham Beaux in 2010, in a booth at NY Now, and had great success. I got a couple of very key accounts that I’m still working with today.
Tell me more about that pivot.
I took a lot of metalsmithing and jewelry-making classes at art school. When I moved to New York, I got a job at this quintessential art supply store, Pearl Paint on Canal Street; rented this great studio; and started a jewelry line called Y Design. I was forging these giant cuffs. There was a fashion designer on my floor, and we became friends. He was doing a runway show and asked me to do jewelry for it. One of my cuffs was on the cover of WWD the next day, and it was a big deal. I got into a gallery in the Hamptons and took the cuffs to a trade show, where I was literally right across from Kate Spade and her bags. This was 1996 or so. I had grown up going to trade shows, and knew my booth had to be cool and unique—it couldn’t just be a table with stuff sitting on it. So I designed this 10-by-10-foot booth and made lights and pendants for it. People wanted to buy the pendants more than the cuffs. I had an architect boyfriend at the time, and he said, “Just put prices on them!” So I did, and sold $10,000 worth of lights over the five-day show.
My dad happened to be coming into town and took me out to dinner, and I asked to borrow $3,500. I needed to get supplies and materials for these orders. He goes, “Wait a second. I thought you were doing jewelry. What is happening?!” Then he went to my studio. I showed him [the pendants] and he said, “Oh my gosh,” and wrote me the check. I’ve never looked back after that. It just became my thing.
When did your stores open?
We just opened a store in West Palm Beach on January 26. We had a showroom in Charleston, but we had to close it during Covid. At that point, our website, which we hadn’t been doing much straight-to-consumer [sales] on at all, blew up. The whole home industry [during the early pandemic] was just wild. We took that and ran with it as long as we could.
I really wanted to open another retail space, so we opened a showroom here in Charleston in July 2025, and then it was like, “Where next?” A year ago this time, I happened to visit West Palm Beach. I had never been there, and I was just fascinated by it. It felt like a kindred spirit to Charleston, and it’s growing. There seemed like a lot of opportunity. I started scouting places and came to this beautiful spot right near downtown. It’s part of a little plaza that has several like-minded businesses in it. Everybody had this wonderful energy, and it’s all higher-end product catering directly to designers. We opened last week, and it was a huge success. I think we’ll be there for a long time.
How did you feel about launching another retail location? There are a lot of depressing stories out there.
I don’t scare easily, but we did want to make sure that our business was nice and healthy before we did it, because there was a little bit of a plunge after the Covid craze. We’ve had many friends and businesses of our size go under and close their doors. I feel very fortunate. It’s very busy, and we’ve had to hire more people this past year. So I felt like it was a good time for us to do it, especially in West Palm, because it’s growing. It’s on fire, whereas Charleston is pretty saturated. There’s a naval base outside of Charleston that is becoming a design hub, but it’s much more to the trade only. I want to push our brand to the public, because we don’t want to just do lighting. We’re starting an accessories line, and we do a pillow line. Those things are much more accessible to a person who walks in and wants to look at a $5,000 chandelier but can’t necessarily purchase one right then.
How are you balancing your time between the cities?
Right now I’m flying back and forth and renting Airbnbs, but this summer I plan on renting or purchasing a house or condo [in Florida], and being down there most of the winter. As I get to know [the city] and make friends, I feel like I will be there more often than not.
How is the Palm Beach store laid out? What’s the vibe?
It is very open and breezy, with a neutral palette and pops of color. Our bread and butter is our beaded fixtures, which are all customizable. You can choose your own bead, and frame size. We have one long, 50-foot wall that has all of our silhouettes in a long line, and underneath is the bead bar, a skinny shelf of all the bead choices, from resins and acrylics to glass and crystal, and then jade and quartz. It looks like a candy shop. A customer can—and pretty much 99 percent of them do—make their own strand. We give them string. It’s fun because it’s interactive and unique to them alone.
How have you gone about merchandising the showrooms, outside of your own lighting?
We’re working on that. I have a sister company called Coco & Gray, which is more of an accessories company that we’re trying to expand; right now it’s just pillows and soft goods. So that’s filling the gap a lot. We are doing some jewelry using heavy metal chains and our higher-end quartz and jade beading. We sold out of them this past week in West Palm! We’re working on a candle line, and we might bring some other companies in as we get our feet wet down there.
It’s really important to me not to have any crossover [with my neighbors]. I don’t want to have anything that Hive has, because we’re very close. This summer, I will travel a lot, and I want to bring unique stuff in. It doesn’t need to be extremely expensive; in fact, I don’t want it to be. I want it to be accessible.
Will you tell me about your e-commerce efforts?
Oh, e-commerce is so harsh! It is the most difficult thing. It’s hard for us to even get our designers to use the website. They really want us to do it for them, and I don’t blame them. Especially with our inventory and the amount of beads we have to keep in stock—it’s challenging to find a [platform] that can handle all of that. We’ve been utilizing Shopify for almost two years, and it’s doing a pretty good job. But Instagram and social media, that’s what pumps it. We’re very surprised when a [non-trade] online purchase is a chandelier. Most people don’t want to spend $5,000 online on something they haven’t seen or touched. It’s not a Chanel jacket. It’s a semipermanent fixture in their homes. I think when we start more accessories, we’ll have more success in the day-to-day online business.
Can you say a bit more about the Charleston design scene?
It’s robust. But the downtown scene—which is my vibe, where I’ve always been—I hate to say it, but the warehouse spots, like the warehouse that we’re in right now, it just got sold for millions and millions of dollars, and they’re tearing it down and putting a condominium complex here. It’s sad, but also I understand it. I don’t know. It’s all becoming very slick and very tall. And don’t get me wrong, there are still pockets, but those will soon be taken over. It’s happening very quickly.
How does it feel to still be launching new aspects of your business 30 years in?
It’s so exciting, because I get bored very easily. I constantly have to be doing something new. My team gets excited about it. You can only do so much of the same thing over and over and over before everyone is bored with it. I’m excited about the accessories coming up.
It’s been literally days since you opened the West Palm Beach store, but what are some of your dreams for the future? Other retail spaces? Different kinds of products?
All of the above. I 100 percent want to open more stores. I want to keep it on this smaller scale, but I’m open to anybody who wants to talk to me about that in the future. I’m open to anything. I would love to open a Manhattan showroom. I would eventually love something in Europe, something on the West Coast. We do a lot of business on the West Coast, through designers. And oddly enough, [sales are] moving in from the middle of the United States, which I never expected. A lot of people think that we’re mostly coastal, but people are branching out. The future is bright if we do it right. We’ve got to be very strategic.
I always end by asking people their favorite day as a shop owner, but will you describe what the opening felt like last weekend, especially considering the weather? Why did you say it felt like such a success?
It was just busy. People were excited, happy—touching everything. On a typical day, I want as many people walking through the door as possible, whether they buy anything or not. It just is good for the brand. It makes me happy to see people walk in with a smile on their face. I don’t know that I’ve ever witnessed a shopper walk in and look disappointed. So it’s that—the excitement on their faces.
