Jacksonville Souvenirs That Aren't Generic Florida Junk

Highlights

• The airport gift shop sells you Florida. It does not sell you Jacksonville.
• The test for a good local souvenir: would somebody from here recognize it without reading the label?
• Under $10 gets you stickers and a can cooler. Under $25 gets you a mug, a tote, or a flag.
• For someone who moved away, specific beats scenic. A Publix free cookie lands harder than a sunset.
• Everything here ships flat and fits in a carry-on

There is a rack at JAX with dolphin keychains on it. There is a shelf of shot glasses that say FLORIDA in a font from 1994. None of it has anything to do with the city you just spent four days in. Here is the other option.

Generic Florida souvenirs have one job, which is to prove you went to Florida. Fine. But you didn't go to Florida. You went to Jacksonville, which is a different thing, and the gift shop has no idea.

What are the best Jacksonville souvenirs?

The best Jacksonville souvenirs are ones a local would recognize on sight: Rex the Beach Boulevard dinosaur, the Jax Beach Pier, the San Marco lions, the Main Street Bridge, and the Publix free cookie. Stickers start at $5.50, mugs and totes run $15 to $22, and a 20-sticker Jacksonville pack is $15.

The test

Show it to somebody who grew up here. Cover the label. If they say "oh, that's the pier" or "wait, is that the scale?" then it's a Jacksonville souvenir.

If they have to read the word JACKSONVILLE printed across a palm tree to know where it's from, it's a Florida souvenir with our name stamped on it. Those are two different products and they get two different reactions.

A pelican on a sunset is nice. It's also available in 400 other coastal cities with the town name swapped out.

Under $10

Stickers are the cheapest way to take home something specific. Ours run $5.50 to $6.50 each and cover the stuff people actually point at: Rex, the Jax Beach Pier, the San Marco lions, the St. Johns lighthouse, the UTW water tower.

A Wells Fargo Building can cooler is $7, which is a strange sentence to write and a very Jacksonville object to own.

Stickers also solve the luggage problem. They weigh nothing and they don't break.

Under $25

This is where most of the catalog sits.

• Mugs, $15. Rex, Five Points Cinema, the Main Street Bridge, Boneyard Beach. A mug gets used every morning, which is more than a shot glass can say.
• Kids shirts and bodysuits, $14. Rex and the Toledo Publix scale. The scale one is for the parents and everybody knows it.
• Accessory pouches, $10 to $12. Main Street Bridge or Five Points Cinema.
• Totes, $19 to $22. Rex, the pier, Lerp, the lions, Klutho Park, the lighthouse. Also the duct taped pub sub, which needs no explanation locally and gets a lot of questions elsewhere.
• The small Jax Humor flag, $19. Twelve by eighteen inches. The full 3x5 is $29, and the double sided outdoor version is $59.

Buying for somebody who moved away

Different job entirely. They don't need proof they were here. They need the specific thing they miss.

Scenic does not work on these people. Specific does. The Publix free cookie hits harder than any skyline print, because it isn't a place, it's a memory of being seven at a bakery counter. Same with the Toledo scale, the hurricane cake, and the pub sub.

We've written more on that angle in our guide to gifts for locals and people who've moved away, and there's a separate one for parents who have lived here their whole lives.

If you only buy one thing

The Jacksonville sticker pack. Twenty 3-inch vinyl stickers, $15.

It's twenty landmarks in one flat envelope: Rex, the pier, the lions, the lighthouse, the Jacobs Jewelers clock, the UTW tower, Sun-Ray, Murray Hill Theatre, San Marco Theatre, the Klutho Park bandstand, the water taxi, the Wells Fargo Building, the Memorial Park sculpture, the Lerp statue, the Jax Humor flag, and five Publix designs.

Bought one at a time those same designs run about $6 each, so the whole pack costs less than three of them. That works out to 75 cents a sticker. It's also the only thing on this list that works as both a souvenir and a gift you split up between several people.

Practical stuff

Everything here ships from us, and shipping is free over $49. Stickers go flat in an envelope. Mugs are the only thing on this list you have to think about packing.

If you're shopping in person and want the story behind the designs first, our guide to the landmarks locals actually point at covers all twenty, including the one that was never built.

Start with the sticker collection if you want to browse, or the sticker pack if you'd rather just get the whole set and be done.