Clover + Bee

Clover + Bee has occupied the same address in Heights Village, the small shopping cluster at the heart of the Cahaba Heights neighborhood of Vestavia Hills, for nearly two decades, though the store on the shelves today looks very different from where it started. Owner Bryson Kessler opened the business seventeen years ago as The Swanky Stork, a maternity boutique that later added a custom baby bedding line under the name Cradle + Bee. In 2021, Kessler phased out both the maternity clothing and the bedding business entirely, rebranding the shop as Clover + Bee and refocusing it on curated women’s clothing, accessories, and gifts.

That willingness to remake the business from the ground up, rather than simply closing when a category stopped working, is part of what earned Clover + Bee Alabama’s Gold Retailer of the Year award in 2023, in the category for stores generating between one and five million dollars in annual sales. Industry judges specifically cited the store’s ability to evolve alongside its customers as it moved through three distinct identities in the same Cahaba Heights storefront.

Today the shop carries contemporary women’s clothing built around an easy, everyday aesthetic, with dresses in maxi, midi, and mini lengths, tops in a range of sleeve styles, denim, shorts, and skirts, along with jewelry, handbags, and shoes. Curated collections rotate by season, and the shop has built a following around brands like Maggie Oaks that are not widely available at bigger retailers in the Birmingham area.

Kessler’s approach to running the business extends beyond the sales floor. She has built a team that includes twelve local high schoolers who work Saturday shifts, an unusual staffing model that both develops young employees and keeps the shop staffed during its busiest weekend hours. She has described wanting the store to do more than sell clothes, saying she hopes it can genuinely change lives and minister to the people who work and shop there, a mission she has extended into a podcast, Honey for Your Heart, where she shares lessons drawn from conversations with customers and employees.

Kessler also stays active in the broader Cahaba Heights business community through the Cahaba Heights Merchants Association and by participating in entrepreneur workshops, connecting Clover + Bee to the network of other small shops, including several other boutiques, that make up the Heights Village shopping cluster. That density of independent retailers in a few blocks is part of what makes Cahaba Heights one of Vestavia Hills’ most distinctive shopping districts, and Clover + Bee has been part of that district’s evolution for longer than almost any other shop on the block.

The shop’s longevity through three separate business identities in the same physical space also makes it something of a living record of how the Cahaba Heights retail corridor itself has changed, shifting over the years from a strip known mainly for baby and maternity shopping toward the broader mix of women’s fashion, home goods, and specialty gift shops that defines the neighborhood today. For anyone new to the neighborhood, the shop is easy to spot along Heights Village, and its storefront has become something of a landmark for shoppers making their way between the district’s boutiques, gift shops, and bakeries on a Saturday morning.

Clover + Bee is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed on Sundays, with free shipping offered on online orders over 100 dollars. For Vestavia Hills shoppers, the store offers a rare example of a small retailer that has successfully reinvented itself multiple times rather than fading out when its original concept ran its course.