Slow buying, fast instinct
Claire reviews hundreds of pieces each season and takes maybe a dozen. If it doesn't make her stop mid-scroll, it doesn't make the shelf.
Vivid Forest Hub is a boutique stocked with things that earn their shelf space: clothing, objects, and gifts chosen slowly and replaced only when something better comes along.
A mid-weight merino from a small knitwear producer in the Scottish Borders, knitted on a 7-gauge machine that gives it a…
£89Woven from unbleached European linen, this tote has a base gusset wide enough to hold a hardback flat. The handles are long…
£34Made by a candlemaker in rural Derbyshire from local hive wax, these burn for around 40 hours and smell faintly of honey without…
£18Thrown on a wheel by a potter working out of a shared studio in Sheffield, these mugs hold 280ml and have a slightly squared…
£28A 70% wool, 30% recycled polyester blend woven in a four-colour check that reads as deep green from a distance and reveals rust…
£52The edit changes with the season. What's here in October won't all be here in December.
Contact usThe 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 range covers clothing, accessories, homewares, and a small but carefully chosen gift section that does particularly well in autumn and around the winter holidays. The forest in the name is not a metaphor for anything complicated. It's just that Claire has always found forests calming, and she wanted the shop to feel the same way: layered, a little surprising, and worth slowing down in.
Above ninety products, the edit loses its coherence.A wool scarf is one of those things that sounds simple and then turns out to have a lot of variables. Length, weight, how you tie it, what you're wearing underneath. Most people default to one method and stick with it. A few small adjustments can make the same scarf work across a wider range of situations.
Read more →Merino has a reputation for being difficult. Most of that reputation is unearned. The fibre is actually…
Beeswax candles cost more than paraffin candles. That's the first thing most people notice. The second…
Claire reviews hundreds of pieces each season and takes maybe a dozen. If it doesn't make her stop mid-scroll, it doesn't make the shelf.
Every purchase leaves in tissue from a small paper mill, folded by hand. It takes an extra ninety seconds and it shows.
The shop runs lean on purpose. A smaller range means every item has been thought about, not just ordered to fill a gap.
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.