Vivid Hue Home + Gifts
769 Farmington Ave | Farmington CT 06032
860-677-0301 | vividhuehome.com
Hours:
Tuesday 10-530pm
Wednesday 10-530pm
Thursday 10-7pm
Friday 10-530pm
Saturday 10-3pm
Sunday 10-3pm
Monday closed
Contact: Heather Grahling hgrahling@gmail.com | 860-677-0301
What do we sell?
Everything from custom made pillows and furniture to unique gifts and greeting cards. We have perfect items for dorm rooms, hostess gifts, house-warming, engagements, birthdays and "just because" gifts. We carry whimsical and preppy products. Our shop has a very nautical feel. Visitors say they feel like they are in Palm Beach or Nantucket. Despite our name and love for all things color, we do carry some neutral products for those that are a bit less daring about color!
We gift wrap and sell gift cards.
Online?
Shop our Instagram feed. We will ship most items to U.S. and we frequently list our current selection of items online. If you see something you'd like for us to ship...please ask! We will ship!
I last left ya'll with the renovations inside the shop. I promise to revisit more of that journey in a future post. Here's a reminder of the transformation:
I decided to take some pressure off of myself by planning a "soft opening" where I would just open the doors to the public at the end of April with only word-of-mouth advertising. I handed out postcards to friends and Connecticut locals, but other than that, there was no big fan fare. This would allow me (and my team of two) to work out the kinks in the process. We could practice the checkout process, work on better staging the products, and get an idea for what customers were interested in.
I'd be lying if I told you this was a stress-free soft launch. I woke up on the morning of April 30th with my stomach in my throat. What if people absolutely hated the shop? What if Connecticut wasn't ready for my splash of colorful gifts?
The soft-opening weekend was exhilarating, overwhelming, tiring, rewarding, exhausting, thrilling and every other similar synonym. People did come to visit. And they visited in droves. Personal friends showed up. People that have followed Vivid Hue Home through social media came to check it out. Some saw the porch display and stopped to check out what we were up to.
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| Opening Day Flowers for Soft Launch |
Much of the initial inventory flew off the shelves during the first weekend and I would go home at the end of the night to place additional orders for back-up inventory. I stayed up til 1-2am most nights trying to catch up on the paperwork and ordering. (Now to be fair, customers seemed to like the products I was offering, but also, I started out with smaller inventory quantities because I wasn't sure what would sell or not).
Vivid Hue Home was featured in a few local spotlights, here and here.
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| Vivid Hue Home Window Boxes Starting to Bloom |
We have been opened for about 2.5 weeks now and already I have learned some tricks. For starters, I have doubled/tripled the size of my orders from vendors so that I don't have to place new orders as frequently. It's cumbersome to issue PO's, enter skus into inventory, receive inventory, pay invoices. So it makes since to do it once for larger quantities versus 2-3 times for smaller order amounts.
Also, I find myself continually tweaking the look of the shop. When we opened, the shelves appeared like this:
I was never thrilled with how each shelf displayed so much inventory. The shelves were cluttered and too much for the eyes to digest. Recently, I modified the items so there are mostly clusters of pillows and throws. It's a bit more visually pleasing and I imagine that I will continue to tweak.
The gurgles now have their own dedicated spot within the shop.
Custom pillows in these fabulous textiles have been the talk of the town.
And, of course, the vintage palm beach chairs are a popular resting spot among visitors.
Thanks for continuing to follow along! If you're a new follower, thank you! And you can always check out what's happening in real time on Instagram here.
