On Bailey’s New Street, tucked into the lanes of Waterford’s Viking Triangle, there is a shop that doesn’t quite fit any single category. It is part gallery, part boutique, part community hub and part declaration of values — a carefully curated space where over 50 Irish artists, makers and designers sell their work under one roof, united by a shared commitment to creativity, sustainability and radical inclusivity. The Magpie Collective is one of the most quietly significant independent retail spaces to open in Waterford in recent years, and the story it tells about the city’s creative community is one worth knowing.
What Is The Magpie Collective?
The Magpie Collective is an art and apparel shop on Bailey’s New Street in Waterford City, run by a non-binary artist and built around a clear set of values: local, sustainable, and celebratory of creativity in all its forms. The collective embraces fat positivity, queerness and neurodiversity — not as marketing language, but as the actual organising principles of what gets stocked, who gets a platform, and what kind of space the shop is for the people who come into it.
The product range spans handmade Irish clothing, original art prints, jewellery, ceramics, accessories, stickers, pins, cosmetics, skincare and second-hand craft supplies — a deliberately eclectic mix that reflects the range of its maker community. You might find a hand-thrown mug alongside a D&D accessory, a slow-fashion upcycled jacket next to a set of queer art prints, a natural skincare range next to a rack of illustrated greetings cards. The logic is not aesthetic uniformity; it is shared ethos.
Customers who have visited describe it as “such a happy, inclusive space” and “the most vibrant little treasure trove with the nicest people running it” — the kind of word-of-mouth that no marketing budget can manufacture, earned entirely by the quality of what’s on the shelves and the warmth of the welcome.
The Makers
With over 50 artists and creators represented, The Magpie Collective is a genuine snapshot of the breadth and originality of independent making in Waterford and across Ireland. A handful of the makers give a sense of the range.
Fat Lemon Prints — Caoimhe Walsh, Dunhill, County Waterford
Caoimhe Walsh is one of the collective’s Waterford-based members, working from Dunhill in the south of the county. Her art explores fat positivity and queer joy with a directness and warmth that translates immediately on paper. She is not a single-medium artist: alongside her prints she whittles mushrooms, knits, creates wall hangings, makes earrings and produces intricate hand-crafted pins. The breadth of what she makes is a reflection of a creative practice that is genuinely exploratory — led by curiosity rather than a brand strategy.
Big Cutie Stitches — Charlotte Kavanagh, Waterford City
Charlotte Kavanagh is a slow fashion designer based in Waterford City whose work sits at the intersection of sustainability, craftsmanship and size inclusivity. Under the Big Cutie Stitches label she creates clothing from reworked and upcycled fabric — funky, considered pieces that are fully size-inclusive and made to last. The slow fashion model is a deliberate counterpoint to the cycle of fast fashion that generates extraordinary volumes of textile waste globally; Charlotte’s approach is to make fewer things, make them better, and make them for bodies that mainstream fashion has historically ignored. With over 4,000 Instagram followers, the audience for this work is growing steadily.
Natures Alchemy — Lynn Shead, County Waterford
Lynn Shead trained as a scientist before turning to herbalism, and the natural skincare range she has built under the Natures Alchemy label carries both the rigour of her scientific training and the knowledge of a practicing herbalist. The formulations use herbs grown in County Waterford, are chemical-free and cruelty-free, and are designed specifically for sensitive skin — a practical focus that comes from lived experience of what many commercial skincare products can do to the skin of people who react to conventional ingredients. Lynn is also one of the five Waterford makers representing the county at Showcase 2026 at the RDS in Dublin this January.
Mily Designs — Catherine, Fenore, County Waterford
Catherine is a sewist and clothes designer based in Fenore, County Waterford, making colourful and playful clothes for children alongside a range of sustainable textile products: reusable sanitary pads, makeup wipes, breast pads and reusable baby wipes. The children’s clothing has the visual energy you’d hope for from a maker who is genuinely enthusiastic about colour and pattern; the sustainable textile range is a practical response to the extraordinary volume of disposable products that the average household goes through in a year. Both come from the same sensibility: make things that work, make them beautifully, and make them last.
Fantaisie Made — Abby Davidson, Belfast
Not every maker in The Magpie Collective is from Waterford — the shop’s network extends across Ireland, and Abby Davidson of Fantaisie Made is a Belfast-based Irish artist whose queer art prints, stickers, badges and cards are stocked in the shop. Abby’s work is bright, celebratory and explicitly queer in its imagery and politics — exactly the kind of thing that The Magpie Collective exists to platform and that has historically been absent from the shelves of mainstream gift retail.
The Collections
The shop organises its stock into collections that reflect the range of what it carries: Irish Apparel, Jewellery, Prints, Stickers, Keyrings, Pins and Lanyards, Cosmetics and Skincare, D&D Accessories and the Queer All Year collection — a permanent range of queer-themed products that signals clearly that this is not a space where LGBTQ+ visibility is seasonal. The Whimsy Galore collection covers the beautifully uncategorisable: the things that exist because someone made them because they wanted to, and that sit on a shelf until they find the exact right person.
The shop also stocks second-hand craft supplies — fabric, yarn, tools and materials that are resold rather than discarded, serving the broader maker community with affordable materials and extending the life of resources that would otherwise end up in landfill. It is a small but meaningful detail: a creative retail space that also serves the creative process of the people who shop in it.
Why It Matters
Independent retail in Irish city centres has been under pressure for a long time. The forces that have reshaped the high street — online shopping, rising commercial rents, the consolidation of retail into large multiples — are well documented. What The Magpie Collective represents is one coherent response to that pressure: a model of retail that cannot be replicated by Amazon or a franchise, because what it sells is inseparable from who makes it and why.
The 50-plus makers represented in the shop are not there because their products fit a commercial brief; they are there because their work reflects values — of sustainability, of inclusivity, of making things by hand with care — that the person behind the shop shares. That alignment between curation and ethos is what gives the space its particular character, and it is the kind of thing that cannot be scaled or franchised or reduced to a formula. The Magpie Collective is what it is because of the specific decisions made by specific people in a specific city.
For Waterford, that matters. A city with a creative sector as rich as Waterford’s — ceramicists, textile artists, illustrators, natural skincare makers, slow fashion designers — needs spaces where that work can be seen and bought by the people who live here. The Magpie Collective is one of those spaces. Go in, pick something up, talk to the people there. The things on the shelves were made by someone not far from where you’re standing.
Visit or Shop Online
The Magpie Collective is at 16 Bailey’s New Street, Waterford City. Opening hours are Wednesday to Friday 11am–5pm, Saturday 10:30am–5pm, and Sunday and Bank Holidays 12pm–4pm. The full range is also available online at themagpiecollective.ie with nationwide delivery. Follow them on Instagram and Facebook at @the_magpiecollective for new stock announcements, maker spotlights and the latest from Bailey’s New Street.
The most vibrant little treasure trove with the nicest people running it.
Customer review
