Photos by Kelli S. Hewett.
Former lawyers Radcliff and Mary Menge at their flagship Tom Beckbe clothing store in Mountain Brook Village.
Radcliff and Mary Menge didn’t set out to build a heritage-inspired outdoor brand with five stores and nearly 200 retail partners.
“The original thing was to be a lawyer,” said Radcliff, who created Tom Beckbe with his wife, Mary.
Both were on solid, conventional tracks: He handled corporate mergers and acquisitions work at Bradley Arant; she did securities litigation at other firms.
They met at Washington and Lee University’s law school in Virginia, dated, clerked for federal judges in Alabama, married and moved to New York.
By any standard, it was a well-crafted success story. But the couple behind Tom Beckbe never quite fit the predictable mold.
“I would say that we’re relentless,” Radcliff said. “I think other people would say that I’m exhausting.”
That relentless streak, paired with Mary’s steady editing presence, is at the heart of how they built the Mountain Brook-based brand that has become a fixture for customers who love the outdoors, craftsmanship and a certain Southern sense of place.
The seed of Tom Beckbe was a single problem Radcliff couldn’t shake. He couldn’t find the field jacket he wanted: one with high-quality cotton and room to lift and shoot a rifle, but with design details that made it suitable for corporate or fine dining settings too.
“You could find a lot of traditional wax cotton jackets,” he said. “The one that existed between my ears was not in the market, and that was American in manufacturing, American in design, American in color, with a nod to the Southeast.”
Radcliff grew up hunting and fishing with his grandfather near the Tombigbee River and the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. As they considered names, they found that in old colonial maps, the French spelled the river’s name as Tombecbé or Tom Beckbe.
They turned the historical river name into a fictional person to honor their Southern sporting roots. For a few years Radcliff ran the business in the evenings while still practicing law. When they saw that the demand for what they were doing was greater than the single product they offered at the time, he left the firm to focus on Tom Beckbe. For the Menges, leaving law wasn’t a cinematic leap. It was slower, more deliberate and very much shaped by their personalities.
Mary stayed in practice two more years to support the family.
“Our original warehouse is the bonus room in our basement,” Radcliff said.
The concept began with Radcliff’s search for a high-quality waxed cotton hunting jacket that would take him from hunting fields to fine dining. It has grown to include a range of men’s and women’s clothing and accessories, as well as four other storefronts in Tuscaloosa, Tennessee, Mississippi and Virginia.
For those two years, they made one product, the signature Tensaw jacket, in two colors and five sizes. The weatherproof waxed shelter cloth field coat features an Alabama red clay-inspired lining.
Even then, one thing was clear.
“Demand has never been the challenge for our business,” Radcliff said. “It’s been trying to balance meeting the demand without overextending ourselves and really trying to stay focused on what our customer wants.”
Mary had watched the business and seen how customers responded.
“It felt like a bigger risk not to try it and see where it went than to stay,” she said.
The safety net mattered, too.
“If things did go terribly wrong, you still have a law degree and can go back to it,” Mary said.
But it wasn’t just the numbers. It was her trust in Radcliff.
“He is really good at everything he does,” Mary said. “It’s a very unusual package of being detail-oriented and extremely creative. He has a very good business mind. He has good taste.”
“Great taste,” Radcliff clarified with a chuckle.
Their personalities, they said, are complementary.
“Our relationship has a great yin and yang,” Radcliff said. “My temperature runs hot and cold, and Mary’s is more stable. Mary is a great grounding force in the brand. That helps us keep an even keel and center and focus.”
She described her role as “definitely not the creative engine, but more of an editor, like this is one too many things to take on right now, or let’s wait a few days before we make a decision on this.”
That dynamic shapes how they think about product, growth and risk.
“Ultimately, we’re the customers, we live here,” Radcliff said. “This is an authentic representation of things that we think fit in everyone’s daily lives: ours, our neighbors’, the community’s.”
Lamar Jester, a financial consultant, is proud to own one of the first jackets, which he learned about from a local friend.
The business was so new that Radcliff himself delivered it to Jester’s home. Jester plans to hand it down to his grandchildren.
“My favorite piece is the original Tensaw jacket I cherish,” Jester said. “I’ve used it for over 10 hunting seasons in the harshest conditions, and at the same time it still looks — and does belong — in almost any formal restaurant in town, as well as on the many European hunting adventures it has accompanied me.”
Over roughly 11 years, the brand has expanded from a bonus-room “warehouse” in the family’s basement to additional stores, ecommerce and hundreds of retail partners.
The Mountain Brook Village store opened in 2021 in the former Christine’s children’s shop, a space Mary spotted in a local moms’ Facebook group.
That corner location, in the community where they live, became their flagship and a template for future stores: welcoming “third places” that feel like they’ve “been here forever,” complete with bourbon lockers that function as a kind of clubhouse for loyal customers. Behind that “lovely little shop” is a Birmingham-based brand with design and warehousing in Irondale and a customer-first focus that carried it through the pandemic, inflation and steady growth.
“From a cultural standpoint the South has its own rich cultural history, particularly as it ties to the sporting life, and we thought that it was underrepresented,” Radcliff said.
That authenticity has guided every step of their growth — from new products to each of the four additional retail stores.
“We always joke that we don’t make anything that anybody needs,” Radcliff said. “We want each store to feel like it’s been here forever.”
The local store has become a showroom, a respite and a laboratory.
Customers walk in asking, “Where are your pants?” and, “Do you make shirts?” That feedback has driven expansions into vests, hats, bags and more.
“You’re never going to bat 1000, but we’re batting above average, and I think that that’s good enough,” Radcliff said.
Behind that inviting storefront is a larger operation than many locals realize.
“Some people don’t realize, we’re a brand located in Birmingham, not one retail store,” Mary said.
And this isn’t an operation where products are mass-produced overseas and shipped to the stores.
“We’re designing it, I’m the creative director, we’re coming up with it, whole cloth, working with manufacturing partners to have it produced, brought to Birmingham, warehoused in Irondale, distributed,” Radcliff said.
The Menges have weathered the pandemic, inflation and the constant complexity of global manufacturing. There are plans for more, but the details haven’t been released.
“If you’re focused on the customer and it resonates,” Radcliff said, “then the business will find a way.”
