10 years in the Making.....

Our 10 year anniversary has strangely coincided with the '2016' trend on social media, giving me the nudge to look back through photos from a whole decade ago as a way to decide how I feel about Forivor turning 10 this year.

It is overwhelmingly a feeling of being proud; we have swan through the rough seas of Brexit and kept our head above water (just), worked through shutdown in covid, faced inflated costs on just about everything and are currently trying to decipher what AI and geopolitics will have in store for us in the next few weeks, months and years. I am most proud that like all species, we have somehow adapted to the rapid changes and stuck around.

In equal measure you'll wake up at approximately 4am wondering if you should have grown faster, if you will ever truly understand shipping logistics, if you have sacrificed a sense of stability forever and whether you are 'pretending' to be professional. But if you are still at it, like we are, it's more likely that you are still enjoying it rather than not.

What I didn't realise when we started Forivor is that there is no turning back....I don't want to go back to the Pret lunch eaten at my desk, the travel into work, the slightly awkward Monday weekend catch up at the photocopier. You might miss guaranteed paid annual leave where you can also fully switch off BUT working with people you love, deciding what you want a year to look like, going for a long walk in the afternoon because you can work in the evening (if you choose to) and constantly learning on the job is a privilege and exhilarating.

Below is a picture of us in 2016 winning an award for best newcomer at our first tradeshow in London (Dot to Dot). It was an exciting time to start a business in the kids arena, which still felt niche and something to be discovered. It's easier to get lost these days amongst all of the thousands of online stores but as we make our way to Paris this week for the Playtime tradeshow, I feel proud that what we have to offer still feels different and most importantly to us, is created with children's eyes and imaginations in mind. In the nearly 88,000 hours that make up the past 10 years we made Liberty London our home and in 2025 began working with Fortnum & Mason. Two places I spent my childhood and adulthood walking around with complete joy and could not have dreamt something we created would be housed there.

I can't deny the photo also makes me yearn for my younger skin but is a reminder to appreciate what you have now as you'll feel exactly the same in another 10 years time!

Other things I have realised is how amazing it is to start something you might know very little about. Pretty brave when you consider it. I have had a good laugh looking through some of our early photoshoots. Some of them surprisingly sophisticated considering experience and budget (no stylist or art director in sight). Whereas the photo below made me realise how naive we were too. We forgot to think that our bedding might need to look super comfy and enticing. And yet in the second picture from the same year Rebecca's daughter was captured so beautifully and is an image l love. Seeing her daughter (and son) grow up in our images alongside them and Rebecca feeling like my family is one of the things I feel most sentimental about.

What's been so heart warming looking back through the photos is sharing all of these experiences with Rebecca. We are both laughing or making each other laugh in the photos of us together. That doesn't mean to say behind the lens there hasn't been a fair share of tears. A business will bleed into every corner of your life but if you surround yourself with the best people then it's always going to ultimately feel positive.

In what other scenario could you find yourself in a professional capacity wearing papier mache hats of cakes and grapes you've made? This is us last year getting ready to be interviewed at Playtime Paris last January. If you are going to go to the trouble of running a business, I urge you to make it as playful as possible. I think I am slowly learning that you don't always have to do things by the book or follow a set path and you should take advantage of being able to create a set-up that YOU want (because much of business life is also going to be dictated to you).

Whats so exciting about working in the baby and children's world is a sense of freedom to create the things we imagined as children ourselves with the hope that we can, in our own way, leave something positive behind us. The pleasure we all seem to be gleaning from the viral '2016' photo share is the realisation that in order to move forward its always important to look back.