Shop Local, NJ! Downtown Summit

by Alice Magdziak • November 28, 2011 • Shopping, Union • Comments (0) • 2689

Welcome to the second installment in our series called Shop Local, NJ! We’re planning on doing all our holiday shopping locally this year and we’re taking you with us. We spent American Express’ Second Annual “Shop Local Saturday” in downtown Summit this year. We bought several gifts for our families and had lots of fun browsing all the stores. Read on to see where we went.

A sample of the great shops in downtown Summit

Buying gifts for a music fan, a runner and an outdoorsman and don’t want to hit the mall and the crowds? Why not try Summit? We found this string of shops right next to each other. The Summit Running Company, Summit Ski & Sport and Scotti’s Record Shop will take care of lots of gifts on your list. Not only does Summit have free customer parking in the garage behind the stores on Springfield Avenue, they also have plenty of street parking if you aren’t keen on garage parking and want to be close to specific stores.

Our first stop after parking was The Papery. With four other NJ stores and one in Virginia, this small chain store is family-owned and filled with beautiful decorations, cards and gifts. We saw the storefront on our way to parking and knew we wanted to go in just from driving by.

The Papery Storefront

We were really blown away by the quality of the merchandise here. Great holiday card sets that we’ve never seen the likes of before, beautiful German ornaments and advent calendars and lots of gifts ideas for ladies who love Crabtree and Evelyn and Vera Bradley fill the spacious store.

Part of The Papery’s great card selection

Got a Vera Bradley fan on your list?

More great gifts and even a little something for yourself

After checking out some really great toy stores, The Toy Professor and A to Zoom, we also stopped in at The Summit Sampler and Urban Paws. The Summit Sampler has special furniture pieces, home decor and smaller gift ideas for adults and children. Urban Paws is a pet spa and boutique that has just about anything you could think of for gifts to give an animal lover or even to find a gift for your own dog!

Summit has an incredible selection of restaurants in the downtown area and it’s also right by the Summit train station so you could even take the train there for a relaxing day of shopping and lunch.

Check out all our photos from Summit: