Gift Focus inc Attire Accessories - March/April 2021

79 UP & COMING Launched in lockdown due to a love of design and street art, Venus & the Cat is a pandemic success story. Here we find out more… When did you start up and why? Venus & the Cat launched for pre-order in October 2020. We’d been looking for some interesting pots for some of our bigger houseplants – we have more 60! – and being lovers of colour and art, we just couldn’t find anything that we both liked. We’re both creative and have always been keen to develop something we could build together that was both functional and beautiful. We have a shared love of street art, which spans decades and felt like no-one else had explored decorating objects like ours with incredible design, so we thought there was a unique space for us in the homeware market. What prompted you to launch the business? When we explored the idea in-depth we saw three key trends in 2020: There’s an expanding market for sustainable, high quality, British-made products. Consumers are becoming far more interested in I 