Airport Experience® News - ACDBE Issue 2025

Right: PLENTY Mercantile is a B-Certified company, having met stringent

standards of social and environmental performance.

A MINDFUL APPROACH Sustainability, Local Focus, Differentiate PLENTY Mercantile At OKC

BY CAROL WARD

Airport (OKC). “The Will Rogers contract was coming up for renewal and all these primes came to town and they were trying to explain to us how it worked,” Matlock recalls. “We fell in love with Paradies [Lagardère] and the way that they work and what was important to them. It was scary…, but it was perfect timing for us – we’ve always been drawn to the airport and we’re grateful to have made the connection.” Walton and Matlock became certified as ACDBEs and partnered with Paradies Lagardère to bring PLENTY Mercantile to OKC in a contract signed in 2020. The PLENTY store at OKC opened in December 2023. The partnership extends to other retail locations at OKC as well. The prime operator “really asked the right questions,” says Walton. “They have a desire for the store to represent itself like it does in the community. We’ve learned from them, but they’ve also learned from us what the Oklahoma traveler and tourists are looking for.” Matlock says the relationship is synergistic. “All we know is all we know, and what we do, we do really, really well, but we don’t – or didn’t – operate in airports,” she says. “Paradies knows what they’re talking about and we know what we’re talking about. We don’t know airports like they do and they don’t know Oklahoma like we do. Bridging that gap and being incredibly candid and showing up with our own expertise, then merging those together has been some of the most healthy abrasion I’ve ever seen.”

Left: Mother-daughter team Traci Walton and Brittney Matlock have been retailers for 13 years and made their first foray into airports just 18 months ago.

Traci Walton and Brittney Matlock entered the airport space with a mix of excitement and trepidation. The mother daughter entrepreneurial team has operated its PLENTY Mercantile in downtown Oklahoma City since 2013 and operates a second location called PLENTY Reserve inside the city’s The First National Center. That location serves as the gift shop for the historic National Hotel. But airports were a different animal. “We were apprehensive about our brand translating into the airport because our foundation is, of course, retail, but also

community service and philanthropy and the feelings that come with that,” Walton says. The idea, however, wasn’t completely far-fetched. “We had always tossed around the idea of how cool it would be to have a store in the airport,” says Matlock. “It was just a far-off distant dream. We had no idea how it worked.” The dream remained nascent for several years, only activated when concessions operators began scouting the city in the late 2010s, ahead of the release of an RFP for concessions at Will Rogers International

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AX NEWS JUNE 2025