Downtown Denville

best shopping town

Denville Wins Best Downtown {2020}!

Although we have always known it, now others will as well … Denville has been crowned Best Downtown in Morris County by the 2020 Readers’ Choice Awards from Morris/Essex Health & Life magazine! Beyond the overall downtown award win, many of our stores, restaurants, and service-based businesses have taken top honors in their individual categories as well (see below). This comes as no surprise as downtown Denville is a consistent destination to many that seek out our top-rated restaurants, boutiques, and all ’round charming atmosphere.

Ample free parking, upbeat music piped through the sound system on Broadway, gorgeous hanging flower baskets, and a real Small Town USA community environment continues to brings visitors and residents to our area regularly. Small towns like Denville continue to compete daily against large brick-and-mortar businesses, and the personalized customer service and unique mix of establishments edge them out against their competing giants. In a year that has been particularly challenging, awards like this do much to buoy the spirits of small business owners.

Come to Denville and continue to support your local businesses, and they will continue to deliver for you … both in exceptional experiences and in supporting the community. After all, it’s their community too.

A huge thank you to all who voted for Denville in the nomination process – it’s your ongoing support that keeps our community moving forward. Now get out there and shop, eat, and support local!

*Our Downtown Relief Fund is another wonderfully easy to support our community as well; more details can be found here.

How to Support Your Favorite Local Businesses

Customer support is crucial to any successful business, but there are a number of ways that you can support your favorite local business without even spending a dime.

  1. “Like” their Facebook page and “follow” their Instagram account. It’s a simple way to keep up with their events, products and news, and helps their business continue to build their audience and find potential new customers.
  2. Engage with their social media posts by liking their posts, commenting, and sharing. Not only do the businesses appreciate your interaction, the engagement helps their pages get seen by others who don’t follow them. More followers = more business.
  3. Leave their business a review on their facebook page, Yelp or Google. People read reviews, and good reviews are golden, and also help the business come up more during web searches.
  4. Share the business in a local group, whether it be a Moms’ facebook group or your favorite town page.
  5. Shop local. The small businesses in town are also the ones saying yes when you ask them to support the local sports teams or donate to your school’s Tricky Tray. And they say yes, because it’s THEIR community too. By you continuing to support them, they can continue to support you and the community.
  6. Give referrals. Word of mouth is a powerful tool, it always has been. When you see someone asking for your favorite place to buy something, give a shout out to your favorite local store and be sure to tag their facebook page while doing so.
  7. Drop them a note and tell them why you love them. Whether it’s a retail, restaurant, or service business, being a business owner in general is challenging, and a few words of encouragement or support can literally make their day. If you didn’t get one of our new Downtown Denville postcards, get in touch and we’ll get you one. They’re a great way to drop a love note in the mail to your favorite downtown business.

NJ and National Main Street

We had the privilege of having our friends from New Jersey’s Main Street program, as well as the National program, join us Friday October 25th. The organizations have worked with us to identify ways to improve our downtown even more with grant identification, marketing tools and recommendations to satisfy community needs. With their help we recently conducted a study from residents about what their vision for Downtown Denville was.

The program representatives lead focus groups with township officials, store owners and more. There are many transformational grants available to help support downtowns progressing forward. We hope to be able to implement them soon based on the results of the surveys and focus groups they lead.