Boden ‘back on course’ after year of heavy losses

“I made a series of mistakes and felt like a fool,” the boss of Boden has admitted after his preppy British fashion brand sank further into the red last year.
Losses at the London-based clothing and lifestyle retailer widened to £9.4 million in the 12 months to the end of December, compared with a loss of £3.9 million in the previous year.
Group sales fell 13 per cent to £304.5 million in the same period, following a “disappointing” performance across all markets.
Johnnie Boden, its founder, said last year that the colourful clothing brand, a favourite of the Princess of Wales and Akshata Murty, wife of the former prime minister Rishi Sunak, had made a “catalogue of mistakes.”
He said he had “effed up” by having gone “too young” with its womenswear and “upset a lot of customers”, scaling back the distribution of its popular catalogue and struggling to stand out in a tough menswear market.
In an attempt to win back customers, the company revived the catalogue that was once a staple of middle-class coffee tables, reduced the level of discounting and scrapped the trend-led focus.
It said that with long lead times in the clothing business, those changes had taken time to flow through to stock, sales and profitability, but that a recovery was now “well under way”.
It reported an 18 per cent rise in sales in the first half of this year with womenswear’s performance up by 35 per cent, led by a 47 per cent rise in dresses.
Reduced discounting had helped lift gross margin by seven percentage points, the company said, and the business returned to profitability during the first half.
Boden said the company had “truly turned the supertanker now” and was “back on course.”
The old Etonian set up his brand in 1991 with a small menswear range. Womenswear was launched a year later, followed by childrenswear in 1996. The business sells via its website and through third-party retailers, including John Lewis and Nordstrom in America, its biggest market.
The company has been a constant presence on Britain’s fashion retail scene over the past thirty years. Its boss was awarded a CBE in June 2023. Boden said that he felt like “a fraud” for receiving it after the recent losses and had even admitted as much to the Prince of Wales.