Pitt Rivers Museum shortlisted for Shop of the Year

The Pitt Rivers Museum is delighted to receive recognition for its reinvigorated retail activity, this week shortlisted for Shop of the Year at the distinguished Museums + Heritage Awards. 

Following a creative transformation inspired by new engagement with the global cultural heritage held within the Oxford institution, the on-site Pitt Rivers Museum shop celebrated its most successful year ever in 2025. 

A new approach to partnership with makers from indigenous and originating communities now enables visitors to take home thoughtfully handmade products that share the stories of the people whose ingenuity shaped the Museum’s collections. This achievement has been supported by new collaborative working with makers, curators, researchers and the Museum’s visitor experience team. 

Welcoming over 500,000 visitors annually, the museum has spent the last decade rethinking its collections, moving towards co-curation with the communities represented. Over the past 12 months, the shop has adopted this approach, and its products now reflect the wealth of craft and breadth of the collections. The museum’s Retail Manager works alongside the Collections, Research and Conservations teams and the indigenous and originating community partners they collaborate with, to source one-off pieces that genuinely reflect the visitor experience.

Direct work with makers and collectives ensures that the Museum is actively supporting the continuation of traditional industries. For example, Benin craftsman Phil Omodamwen, a sixth-generation bronze caster is helping to preserve the lost-wax casting method for contemporary audiences. The Al Am’ari women’s collective in Ramallah produces hand-embroidered tatreez as one of their few sources of income. Locally in Oxford, the Shop offers bespoke linocut prints of the Museum, pottery from tradition wood-fired anagama kilns in Wytham Woods, and designs by a local women’s artists collective. Responses to the Intrepid Women exhibition and book launch produced six unique designs, now printed on tea towels, postcards and notecards.

Sales performance has been transformed, with 2025 revenue substantially higher than in 2024 and spend per visitor up. Visual merchandising has become dynamic, changing seasonally and responding to evolving visitor profiles, exhibitions, workshops and collaborations across the Museum. Throughout, many products are made using recycled or otherwise sustainable materials. 

The Museums + Heritage Awards 2026 take place on 13 May at a ceremony in London. 

Flying elephants and handmade decorations from around the world for Christmas 2025; dewi goddesses and the Intrepid Women book

Hand thrown pots, fired in the Oxford anagama kilns at Wytham Woods - a traditional Japanese wood firing method that creates unique effects and colours in the glaze

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