Where Nature Meets Dreams
A Conversation with Alice & Rebecca of Forivor
When poetic illustration meets the art of storytelling, childhood magic comes to life. Discover the story of Rebecca and Alice, the creative duo behind Forivor. From a serendipitous connection to a shared passion for the natural world, they share how their reversible, dreamlike bedding is transforming bedtime for families. Step inside their enchanting universe and explore the deep respect, creativity, and values that thread through everything they make.
Forivor is born from the meeting of two creative minds.
Rebecca and Alice, could you start by introducing yourselves? We’d love to know how your paths crossed and how your individual talents complement each other in your day-to-day work at Forivor.
Alice: Our paths initially crossed in the digital world of facebook as a mutual friend tagged me in a post where Rebecca had announced she was looking for an illustrator for an idea she had. Everything since then has felt much more mysterious and serendipitous, from being asked constantly if we are sisters to feeling a sense of belonging with each other; that our upbringing, although rooted in different places have informed our outlook in life and are somehow linked. As Rebecca will attest, I can stick my heels in and be more reluctant to change so I rely on her to move forward. I’ve learnt through her to be more fearless or at least to try to be! In the reverse Rebecca always makes my slower approach to what we do feel appreciated. I think for a partnership like ours to work you have to really look up to the person you work with and admire them, that respect pushes our practice but also means that you want the best for both of you.
Rebecca: I'm filling in this interview reading Alice’s responses as I go which always makes me feel a little emotional to read her retelling of our story. I can’t believe how lucky Alice and I were to find each other in this busy world. We are so similar and so different in all the right ways to really enjoy creating the world of Forivor together over all these years. I absolutely agree that you really have to look up to the person you share such a huge part of your life with. I value Alice’s impeccable taste and more cautious approach so much and I think our similar values, love, care and respect for each other, our loved ones and our planet is at the heart of why we work so well together.
How did your friendship evolve into a business partnership, and how do your different skills, Alice’s illustrations and Rebecca’s storytelling complement each other in the creative process?
Alice: We really began as business partners as Rebecca asked me to move from illustrator to co-founder pretty quickly. Initially I was commissioned to create our first collection “The Enchanted Forest” but after a few meetings she asked if I wanted to come on board as a business parter. We must have recognised an early friendship now that I think back as we both must have felt a sense of trust as well as potential in one another. Illustration for me before Forivor was something quite private and solitary and I didn’t think I would enjoy the creative process with someone else. What has surprised me is that I really value Rebecca’s input and opinion on my drawings and feel we share the same aesthetics. It helps to motivate me in lots of ways as I'm always eager to know what she thinks of a new drawing or idea. Before I begin the drawing the creative process is very much a shared endeavour. Everything has been informed by Rebecca’s understanding and love of the natural world, this often guides the genesis of a new collection and together we begin to map out a theme and why it’s important. Once the illustration is completed Rebecca will use the characters and drawing to start creating the cards or book that accompany the quilts and muslins.
Rebecca: I am so pleased that we weren’t friends before we set up Forivor. Alice is like family to me and my children but our friendship grew alongside the building of the business. I haven’t ever built a business the other way around but I think adding space for our friendship outside of Forivor as we grew closer has worked for us rather than having to work out a professional dynamic alongside a social one and protect an existing friendship from the challenges and stresses of a small business.
Can you explain the guiding philosophy that drives every product you create?
Alice: In a broad sense it is about creating a feeling of awe at the natural world and honouring the power of our imaginations, finding the symbiotic relationship between the two. The thought and time we put into anything we make from a muslin to a pillow slip begins with a consideration of the longevity of the product. So many baby and kids products are disposable but we know if you can make something special enough they become integral parts of a families life that become as treasured as a favourite book or toy we keep for life. Increasingly, I feel it is a sense of evocativeness that Forivor creates for our customers. I am always guided by the children’s author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s statement that you shouldn’t make anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Ultimately I know if I don’t love something I am going to struggle to invest in content and marketing around it.
The day-to-night concept is central to your brand. How did you come up with the idea of reversible designs that transform from realistic nature to magical worlds?
Rebecca: It was around 2012, before I had children and whilst I was working at the Environmental Justice Foundation in London. We were campaigning on the cotton industry (and other environmental justice issues) I was also thinking about how we needed to increase the share of organic cotton in the textiles industry and having recently shopped for bedding noticed how little (at that time) organic bedding there was available (and it was all pretty boring).
At the same time I was trying to write a story for my goddaughter Coco about an epic overland journey I'd been on to Hong Kong. It led me to reflect on the very precious simplicity of bedtime when you are a child. How childhood bedrooms and bedtime routines stick with us and the importance of keeping that free from digital distraction. I realised that my passion for nature and wildlife had been fostered very early in childhood and that I loved rhinos simply because someone had given me a cuddly rhino when I was small.
I vividly remember thinking about all of this in some sort of epic bundle of thoughts and waking up in the morning having dreamt up the idea for day to night - fact to fiction storytelling bedding. I wanted to create something that would stay with a child as they grew, something that would nurture that innate love of nature that children have so that it becomes central to their being as they grow. I wanted to tap into the power of things we love as a child and how we remember that as we turn into adults and choose what course to take in this world.
I told my boyfriend straight away and a couple of years later once I was pregnant with my first child I finally found Alice to create our first designs.
In your view, how does this transformation help children transition from the activities of the day to the world of dreams at bedtime?
Rebecca: I wanted to create something that would stay with a child as they grew, something that would nurture that innate love of nature that children have so that it becomes central to their being as they grow. I wanted to tap into the power of things we love as a child and how we remember that as we turn into adults and choose what course to take in this world.
I really believe in the quiet power of bedtimes as a moment of very subtle and gentle learning alongside most importantly a moment to check in with your child and make them feel safe. Its the moment me and my children whisper quiet things we may not have had time to talk about during the day or somehow feel safer to talk about wrapped in a cosy bedtime.
Unfortunately we (generally) can't control our dreams but I do believe we can help them be more gentle perhaps. I hope that having bedding with familiar and well loved characters to greet you as you clamber into your bed can feed into creating a safe and inspiring space for a child to prepare for sleep.
Alice’s beautiful illustrations either on their own, or with the storytelling cards alongside, through their transformation from wildlife we might recognise to magical creatures, have a quiet power to absorb children and parents in gentle creativity and learning that can be an important part of a settling bedtime routine. Ideally Forivor bedding helps children learn really good sleep habits as they grow up so that they always make time for a gentle winding down from the day and being quietly thoughtful before bed.
The stories you tell through your collections feel like portals to other worlds. Looking back at your own childhoods, was there a specific place in nature or a particular bedtime story that fueled your imagination and inspired the magical, dual-sided universe you create today?
Alice: I love children’s books now as much as I did when I was a child and still buy them. Like all children they were often the clues to understanding the words on the pages and the life around us. The details of the illustrations always delighted me and are always a way to take us to a far away place but often by drawing on our own experiences. I love Graham Oakley books where he drew mice and a cat living in a church, I poured over the dense illustrations and loved the secret life after dark that no one knew about. Storytelling and creativity were woven into my childhood. My father, a painter and decorator by profession but an artist in the home, grew up in India as as children he would tell us stories of their childhood adventures in the forests of Tamil Nadu. We rarely believed them or understood that had been his experience but I remember that feeling of being taken away to a completely different place. I think that sense of adventure and fantasy was always part of my family and is prevalent in Forivor’s universes.
Rebecca: I grew up in a very old stone house without electricity in the hills underneath the Black Mountains on the Welsh borders - not so far from where I have returned to with my own children. The most precious memories of my childhood are of the fields, river and woodland that surrounded our house. The shape and rise and fall of the land is forever imprinted in my being - if I close my eyes - 40 years later I can still remember how the flat rocks of the stream felt underneath my feet, the joy of chewing sour sorrel in the long grass or how it felt to crawl down through the roots of our favourite tree (that the Enchanted Forest design is based on).
Because we had no electricity I also read a lot and was read to by my dad - Lord of the Rings terrified and enthralled me. My favourite book of all time is My Family and Other Animals by Gerard Durrell and I remember just devouring the work of authors once I discovered them - Roald Dahl, Gerald Durrell, Jane Austen, Edith Blyton and many others. Its illustrated books though that if I find them on a shelf and open them all these years later it feels like going into a time machine. I can remember how they set my imagination on fire as a child and how they made me feel whether they were encylopedias on the body or books of children’s poetry and verse.
Your collections from the Enchanted Forest to the Secret Skies are deeply rooted in natural habitats. How much research goes into the wildlife and plant life before Alice begins her intricate drawings?
Its different for every collection we create but for example the Enchanted Forest as our first exploration into our concept was fairly simple - we chose quite obvious animals from a woodland and I researched them and wrote stories after the designs were finished. The Legends of the Sea collection was my favourite in terms of research as we went to the Anglesey Sea Zoo in North Wales to research all the incredible British marine wildlife they have there. We saw juvenile sting rays in a tank and I remember both Alice and I (and my daughter Remie) being totally captivated with them and deciding there and then we had to make them cabaret dancers.
Our “Once Upon a Feast” collection was more of a back and forth along the way - I remember Alice asking me about wild foods to include on the tea party side of the design and I sent her a picture of Sorrel Devilled Eggs that I'd created with dandelions for decoration. She drew the plate exactly as I sent it to her and when the cookbook eventually comes out (i'm working on it) it will have the recipe in it.
The Secret Skies collection explores our relationship with birds migration and their folklore. What inspired you to bridge the gap between ancient mythology and modern-day bird behavior in this specific range?
Alice: Rebecca had been telling me about the ‘Flyways’ the incredible bird ‘motorways’ in the sky we can’t see which thousands of species of birds and insects use to migrate across the earth. But we also felt because we would be exploring a space which isn’t familiar or perhaps felt more constrictive that linking it to a mythological world could offer more. To begin with we asked ourselves why the Stork is synonymous with delivering new born babies to their parents? This was fascinating as we realised that the birds were vehicles in one sense to navigate complicated realities of life (how babies are created) but that they had specifically been chosen because of how they reflect human life, building nests which they return to, rearing their young and having a familial life. As we get older it is a cliche but we somehow become much more interested in the lives of birds, we watch them more and I have noticed since having a balcony where I can watch the magpies, pigeons and seagulls in Ramsgate by the sea that we share so much in common in our behaviour and communication. There also remains a beautiful mystery to them, we can’t domesticate them like a cat or dog unless we cage them (with a few exceptions) so there also remains this distance about them which feels like our relationship to ancient mythology - it is close yet far.
How do you design products that are meant to be cherished and passed down through generations?
Alice: Using good quality materials to start with and having amazing manufacturers is an important place to start. We then consider how a product can change with a family too. Our baby muslin won’t be able to swaddle a baby indefinitely but because we design them as works of art many families frame them or hang them up in rooms or keep them wrapped up for future grandchildren. The large muslin can be used for adventures as you grow and visits to the beach while our quilts move all around the house, from nurseries, making dens, onto sofas and back to beds. We hear from customers that their children often describe our blankets as feeling like ‘home’ and alongside the illustrations which are evocative of books and illustrations we’ve grown up with, the products themselves become vessels of people’s lives, especially special moments in families lives that they want to keep in their homes as keepsakes of memories.
As you continue to weave ‘bedtime magic’ for families around the world, what is the next dream or habitat you hope to bring to life in the future of Forivor?
Alice: We always find it difficult to move into the next phase of new collection ideas before we’ve launched the most recent design but we always have ideas whirling in our heads. We do feel that moving out of a British/European world excites us, perhaps looking at the wildlife of the area of India our manufacturers are based or travelling somewhere we’ve never been. I think the idea of investigating species that have had successfully reintroduced after near extinction could be amazing as a positive story or at the other end of the spectrum looking at species that are currently at their closest to extinction as a call to arms. We’ve always liked the idea of working with an organisation working with particular areas of conservation. Personally I would also love to draw a collection around nature in cities. As a person who loves the people watching, architecture and glamour of a city I think there’s a lovely opportunity to that distinct idea of urban nature were we see a dandelion growing through a crack in the pavement and see the glimpse the foxes at night on their nocturnal adventures.
Rebecca: There are endless possibilities from the macro to the micro and its funny how we end up settling on a theme as its usually just out of our own curiosity to explore that habitat or wildlife further. I dream about doing a collection with rhinos in but have also been pondering something which looks at flowers as the central theme - perhaps this interview is the perfect inspiration for that!
