Blog: A whistlestop tour through the wonderful world of Boden

If you stay on the central line just a few stops after the hordes heading to shopping Meccas Oxford Street and Westfield London have disembarked, you arrive at another retail landmark – the home of middle class fashion favourite Boden.

Its North Acton concrete base certainly isn’t the most inspiring sight from the outside.  The retailer acknowledges this with the cheeky sign it has plastered on the building, which reads: “Ugly building. Nice clothes”.

I’m greeted by its affable founder Johnnie Boden. Despite setting up the mail order retailer 22 years ago, Johnnie is clearly still as rooted in the retailer as ever.

For no-one knows the Boden customer like the man who created the brand. Throughout the building, from the design to the photography department,  post-its saying “Johnnie Loves” are scattered across imagery showing he has given his seal of approval.

He personally signs off every collection – in fact, the day I arrive he’s due to sign off its spring 2014 range.

Fashion wasn’t always Johnnie’s game. He had stints as stockbroker – which he admits he was really bad at – and a pub manager before he decided his future was in fashion.

He is not alone at the helm, however. The retailer is run as a partnership between Johnnie and his long-term sidekick Julian Granville, who joined Boden when it was just four years old and in serious trouble.

Granville is the ying to Johnnie Boden’s yang. While Johnnie has a hundred ideas a minute, you get the impression that Granville is the one to determine which ones have legs.

The Boden building is half fashion house, half publishing firm, and its famous catalogue - a staple on many a coffee table - takes a lot of effort to produce. Proofs and images are pinned to every surface, conjouring up images of the offices of Vogue.

Young bucks Asos and Net-a-Porter have taken publishing in retail to a new level with their magazines but Boden is the retailer which first made a printed product that its customers wanted to keep in their handbag.

And even though 90% of its sales now come from online, Boden insists that the catalogue is still an integral part of the business and will not disappear or diminish.  

Online, of course, is booming for Boden, but not as much as international which already accounts for more than half of its sales. Americans in particular, perhaps influenced by the Kate & Wills factor, seem to love Boden’s British dream.

It’s strange to think that this ugly concrete building in North Acton is dressing families from Nuremberg to New York.