Print, Colour, and Brand DNA: Lessons From Inside Boden
How understanding your customer and brand essence creates prints that resonate and collections that succeed.
I joined Boden in April 2022, right as the brand was moving into a new creative direction. Leadership was exploring how to refresh the customer base and evolve the aesthetic, shifting away from the colourful, eccentric, and distinctly Boden design towards something more polished, younger, cosmopolitan, and international (think New York’s Chelsea: effortless blow-dries, styled silhouettes, and midriffs on show).
When the first collection under this new direction launched in September 2022, the contrast was apparent. A refreshed sans-serif logo, a clean reimagining of a 90s-era Boden mark, appeared alongside a noticeably more minimal aesthetic compared with the “happiness you can wear” bucolic holiday scenes the brand was known for. Palettes were darker, styling leaned cooler and more editorial, and prints, when they appeared, were small-scale and deliberately pared back. They could have belonged to almost any contemporary brand, a stark contrast to the bold, joyful patterns long associated with Boden. The streets of Chelsea, New York, didn’t like it, and neither did the long-standing UK loyalists.
Sales flatlined in just one season, and 2023 ended with a £12.3 million loss.
https://www.theindustry.fashion/boden-back-in-profit-after-a-tricky-few-years/
Whilst the supply chain was already in motion, with orders placed months in advance, the brand courageously had no option but to course-correct in real time. Overnight, it became a full-scale mobilisation: every person, every department, and every resource committed to steering the ship back on course.
For the print team and wider design team, the brief was immediate and unambiguous. We had to look back over more than 20 years of successful collections and distil them into a clear language of print and pattern that aligned with who our customer actually is.
“Kate,” the internal name for the Boden customer, taken from the most common name in the database, has always gravitated toward bright colours and bold, distinctive print. She comes to Boden because she wants something she can’t find everywhere else.
But what does that really mean? In a world where you can buy a printed dress from almost any fashion brand, what makes a printed dress a Boden printed dress? We set about defining Boden’s print.
Bold, round and large scale
Two images of my mum in the 2010s come to mind: she’s wearing practically the same linen dress a few years apart, just in different prints. Both are rounded, confident, large-scale patterns, joyful, generous prints that make a statement without trying. She must have loved that dress and those prints to buy it twice in two different iterations.
At Boden, it was sometimes tricky to give this kind of print an exact name. The team affectionately called them “bubbly.” And the dictionary definition of bubbly, though usually used to describe a person, I believe captures the essence of the print perfectly:
2. (of a person) full of cheerful high spirits.
“a bright and bubbly personality”
Similar:
Vivacious, animated, ebullient, lively, full of life, spirited
‘Bubbly’ prints in recent Boden collections:
Optimistic, fresh and fun
British people aren’t always known for their optimism. The weather is often cold and grey, the food traditionally bland, and the national mood can lean a little… stoic. But Johnnie Boden? He built a brand on seeing the brighter side. Union Jacks, Wimbledon, Music the country’s rich and eccentric heritage. All of it, to him, was something to celebrate.
And the customer, far and wide, loved that spirit. Conversational prints featuring lobsters and tennis rackets; unexpected colour clashes; bold placements on long dresses, they offered a joyful antidote to the everyday gloom. A rainbow trench coat, for instance: practical, yes, but also unapologetically cheerful.
Colourful spots and rainbow stripes
A classic; you really can’t go wrong. Boden does them best in bright, punchy colours and, sometimes, in wonderfully unexpected ways. Inoffensive, wearable, and effortlessly stylish. Classically Boden.
Even the bus wears them well.
Bright and bold checks
A British classic, always. Add a splash of neon, and suddenly you’ve got a new classic.
All of these prints were undeniably Boden, yet Boden doesn’t “own” any single one of those styles; it’s their combination, curated together, in colour, style, and attitude, that becomes unmistakably Boden. By reintroducing that mix through supplemental orders, and later through complete design cycles, we were able to pull the brand back on course and reconnect print with Boden’s DNA:
Bold. Beautiful. Bright. British. HAPPY.
New and old customers flooded back. The ship was turning. In the year to 28 December 2024, Boden returned to a pre-tax profit of £34.6 million.
Turnarounds this fast are rare in the choppy seas of fashion.
Exceptional leadership from Johnnie Boden and the executive team played a part, as did the sheer dedication of everyone at Boden. A key ingredient? Deep understanding of print from a customer perspective. What do they come to your brand for? What makes your prints unmistakably yours?
Even now, my clients reference my Boden days. They love ‘Boden-y’ prints and ask how to craft print-and-colour stories that are truly unique and true to a brand’s DNA. Understanding both your customer and your brand DNA is essential to creating prints that work in any fashion collection.
If you want to explore where print could sit in your collection, get in touch. In the meantime, follow along here for more insight into the business of pattern from the perspective of your in-house print team.
Loved reading this! So inspiring to hear your experience 😍