The dock’s independent art and design shop The Nest is helping two best friends from Ukraine who are restarting their candle business after fleeing their home.
Owner Katherine Caldwell was looking for a Ukrainian maker to support in the run-up to the city hosting Eurovision. She spotted Anna Shturmak and Anastasiia Berest’s candle collection VIRA on social media and got in touch to offer them the chance to showcase it at The Nest.
Katherine says she felt a connection to the friends, who are both in their early 20s, as soon as she met them, “They were telling me about their families and how they’d been affected by the war. They have all this worry about the uncertainty and the immediate danger that their families are potentially in, and they’re still trying to imagine some sort of future without really knowing what they’re going back to.
“English isn’t their first language so they’ve had to learn pretty quickly and they miss their families and friends so much, so there have been a lot of challenges for them.
“With Liverpool hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine, I wanted to find a Ukrainian business that I felt we could really get to know and give some hope to. I felt Anna and Nastya’s was one that just needed the benefit of being somewhere like Royal Albert Dock and having this huge audience during Eurovision seeing their work and hopefully buying it.”
The Nest is selling VIRA candles on a non-profit basis. Katherine continues, “It’s not a case of me giving them charity. I think their brand can be really successful because they’ve done everything – the creation, the branding and design – so well.”