Many thanks to Altrincham Unlimited - the Altrincham Business Improvement District (BID) for featuring us on their social media platforms!
ALTRINCHAM BUSINESS SHOWCASE 🌟🌈
A big hello to Gareth & Steven from VH Interiors, today's showcase. VH Interiors is a wonderful shop for everything Vintage to Gifts & Cards with even better customer service 😀🌈
•Tell us a little bit about yourself and your business?
We are Steven and Gareth from VH Interiors and our shop The Hive is located on Grosvenor Road in #Altrincham. We would describe The Hive as a homeware store with a strong focus on vintage, but we also sell a carefully curated mix of furniture, lifestyle items, gifts and cards too.
We established and launched VH Interiors in 2015 to take back control of our work / home life balance and spend more time together doing something we both loved. The previous decade consisted of Steven working 12 hour shifts in the emergency services and Gareth working 5 days a week in retail, so we were like ships passing in the night!
We began trading at Altrincham Market in August 2015 and the support from the customers and fellow independent business owners over the past 5 years has been amazing. We're looking forward to working with Altrincham BID and the other local businesses post Covid-19.
•What are you doing to integrate your business in the community during this difficult time?
After being a member of the Altrincham community for 5 years, we’ve often been there when our customers have started new careers, moved into their first homes and married their soul mates. So we found it extremely hard to close our doors on our customers, many of whom we now call friends.
We wanted to still give something back to our community, so we created a temporary book bank at the front of our shop whilst our doors were closed. The local community really enjoyed using it and we regularly receive lovely notes thanking us for launching it.
It’s heart-warming to see how popular it has become, so we’ve decided to run a Go Fund Me campaign to replace the temporary book bank with a vintage red telephone box, that will be a weatherproof book bank for everyone to use 24/7.
•How will you be operating differently and managing social distancing in the shop?
Despite approaching our 15th anniversary, we really do love spending time together and we work well together!
Covid-19 reminded us that we set up our business to take control of our lives and spend more time together.
So we decided to focus on The Hive full time!
You will now find us at the shop 5 days a week, every Tuesday-Friday between 11am-5pm and 9am-5pm on Saturdays.
The Hive is following the “Covid Secure” guidelines.
We strictly monitor the number of people in the shop at once, we have automated hand sanitiser stations at the entrance and the till area of the shop (which we request all customers to use), and we also clean certain “hot zones” including the card reader after each interaction.
We also have more products than ever on our website www.vhinteriors.co.uk and offer free local delivery or kerbside pickup for those not quite ready to venture out yet.