The Story So Far

In Hornchurch Essex in 1991, a little shop opened called Crafty Arts, supplying discounted art supplies and craft materials for all ages by a husband and wife duo, he was very business minded and she was very creative and so grew Crafty Arts.

The shop provided a wide range of products to a diverse customer base from professional artists to enthusiastic amateurs.

Crafty Arts then moved from Hornchurch to Lakeside shopping centre and had a stall in what was called the Pavilion. The Pavilion was known for it’s out of the ordinary stores and so Crafty Arts fitted right in with its sort after creative products. At that point Crafty Arts were best known in Lakeside for its range of 3D Decoupage.

Years later Crafty Arts was searching for a more local store, which had a larger premises for a new bespoke on site framing service for its customers. So then they stumbled upon a nice store in the heart Brentwood Essex and it had all they required to expand their range.

Over the years as the shop grew the products grew with larger range of craft supplies from card making to jigsaw puzzles to mount cutters to sequin art to sculptors' clay and much, much more.

A few years after moving to Brentwood there was noise of a new shopping centre opening of which was going to be hailed as one of the largest stores in Europe opening in Dartford, Kent called Bluewater. The centre was looking for luxury and unique stores so Crafty Arts put in an offer not expecting to get very far, but to their surprise Bluewater loved their store and its concept and had previously visited the Lakeside Premises. The offer was accepted! Crafty Arts moved from their Pavilion stall and opened its largest store to date!

While all this was happening in the background the owner’s son had grown up and become a proficient website designer. He started the website in 2000 from home on the weekends and due to the quick success moved to the Brentwood store office full time. Crafty Arts began to grow rapidly and before long www.craftyarts.co.uk was born.

In the early days Crafty Arts operated as a multi-site retail premises, but as the online business grew so quickly the need for more storage space became urgent. In October 2009 www.craftyarts.co.uk moved to its own premises a 4000sq ft warehouse of which became the Crafty Arts Head Office. Over the next year the pragmatic decision was made to close the Brentwood shop and migrate staff based at the Brentwood shop to the expansive warehousing facilities in Romford.

Now hitting its 20th Anniversary Crafty Arts has grown from strength to strength and E Commerce Manager Jay has said "My parents have built Crafty Arts from scratch and has built a good reputation and I intend to carry on the development of this service, as all of our customers are important to us.

In the shops we have been fortunate to build relationships with our customers. We want to do the same online so customers can talk to us by phone, email and now online chat. We are also happy to take orders online or over the telephone. The great thing about having a online service is that we are able to deliver word wide".

And so the journey continues!

The End

Crafty Arts are specialists in the distribution and retail supply of art supplies and art materials art materials, jigsaw puzzles and games sourced from leading manufacturers including Crosswater, Derwent, Posca, Fimo, Cryla, Gibson, Ravensburger and many more.