Claire Redfern opened Vivid Forest Hub in October 2019 with forty-three products on the shelves and a very specific idea of what the shop should feel like. She'd spent years in large retail environments where…
The shop now carries around ninety products at any given time, a number Claire has decided is the ceiling. Above ninety, she says, the edit loses its coherence and starts to feel like a market stall. The…
The first winter was harder than expected. Footfall was slow, and Claire spent a lot of January 2020 rearranging the same forty-three products and wondering if she'd miscalculated. Then the shop found its…
Claire Redfern spent eight years buying for a mid-size lifestyle retailer in Bristol before deciding she'd rather curate a shop she'd actually want to walk into. She trained in visual merchandising at a trade school in Edinburgh, then ran the accessories floor of a department store in Manchester before the pull of something smaller won out. In autumn 2019 she opened Vivid Forest Hub, drawn by the idea that a boutique should feel like a clearing in the woods: calm, surprising, lit from above. She keeps a running notebook of things she finds beautiful and a standing order with a small paper mill for wrapping stock she considers worth the effort.