The street address on this listing, 230 Southpark Circle, is the mall’s own address. Shingar is a tenant inside Southpark Mall, the enclosed mall that serves the Tri-Cities of central Virginia — Petersburg, Colonial Heights and Hopewell, plus the surrounding parts of Chesterfield, Dinwiddie and Prince George counties. That changes what the trip is. This is not a standalone bridal salon on a side street where you book an appointment and make an afternoon of it. It is a storefront on a mall concourse, and you can walk in on the same trip that gets your brother new cleats.
The mall opened in 1989 and runs roughly 800,000 square feet on a single level, with surface parking all the way around. Its anchors are Macy’s, JCPenney, Dick’s Sporting Goods and a Regal cinema. The city lists the mall at I-95 exit 54, Temple Avenue (Route 144), with mall hours of 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Individual store hours can differ from the mall’s, so call ahead at (804) 526-2224 if you are driving in from Dinwiddie or Prince George.
What’s on the racks
Shingar appears on the official retailer locators for Jovani and Dave & Johnny — the first a designer label, the second a lower-priced prom line. The shop describes itself as covering prom, quinceañera, bridal and mother-of-the-bride, and it is categorized as a bridal shop rather than a prom-only store. Its Facebook page lists its price range as $$$.
The practical effect of that mix: in April you are sharing the floor with brides and with women shopping a wedding, and the prom inventory is one part of a broader formalwear business. That cuts both ways. Fewer racks devoted purely to prom than a dedicated prom store, but the shop is open and stocked in October and July too.
Who shops here
Colonial Heights High School on Conduit Road graduates a small senior class — total enrollment sits around 850. The bigger feeders are outside the city: Prince George High School runs about 1,785 students in grades 10 through 12, and Dinwiddie High School about 1,320. Petersburg and Hopewell students are ten to fifteen minutes away by car.
The other half of the customer base is the Army. Fort Gregg-Adams sits just east in Prince George County, headquarters of the Combined Arms Support Command, with about 70,000 personnel training there in a year. The store’s own social posts tag army ball alongside prom, which is what a formalwear shop in this particular town ends up doing.
Before you drive over
Public feedback on this location is thin and split. Facebook shows 84 reviews with a 90 percent recommendation rate; Yelp has two, one of which describes a special order that arrived late and a final-sale policy on a wedding-party dress. Neither sample is large enough to draw a conclusion from. What it does suggest is worth doing anywhere: if a gown has to be ordered rather than taken off the rack, get the arrival date and the return and exchange terms in writing before you pay a deposit, and ask whether alterations are handled in the store or sent out.
Shingar also operates stores at Greenbrier Mall in Chesapeake and the Mall at Prince Georges in Hyattsville, Maryland, so a dress seen at one location is not automatically hanging in Colonial Heights.