H&B founder, Alice Begg, chats with Penny about the Summer collection for 2025, where she finds inspiration for the upcoming season, designing prints, fabric choices and what it's like to see your designs out in 'the wild!'.
Penny: What is your starting point for designing new prints for a new collection?
Alice: "I play around with mark making, creating patterns, using watercolour to do the initial designs for the prints. We use a lot of the same shapes every year, but I love to add in a few new pieces each season. I gather inspiration for these throughout the year. Inspired by someone I’ve seen, a garment I’ve loved in a film. Inspiration can come from anywhere, even a space or social event I've been to and had a real feeling about.”
Penny: Where do you find your inspiration?
Alice: "Particularly when designing the summer collection I really like to be somewhere warm to start the creative process for the prints, on holiday ideally - Portugal and Greece have been recent locations. For this collection I designed all the prints when we were in Crete, Greece, last Easter.”
Penny: And what inspired the colours you’ve chosen for this collection?
Alice: "Sun, hot colours, tiles, flowers, blue skies, a building painted a vibrant colour. I love to see a strong colour palette all together and then it just flows. So I tend to do one collection all in one go over a couple of weeks.”
Penny: What's your favourite print this season, and what do you think the customer favourite will be?
Alice: "I do love the 'Honey Heart' print for its strong vibrancy, it's named after my daughter and her obsession with drawing hearts, so it seemed the perfect name. I think this is going to be a hit just from the reaction we’ve all had when we’ve seen it. Then the 'Fruit Bowl' print we were about to give up on as it wasn’t quite working being block printed so we tried screen printing it, to get some sharper lines and brighter colour, and now it's looking really great, so I think that could be good. The 'Shangri La' is a smaller, more detailed print, we all love it! It’s a hard one to get across on camera, so I hope it will be a good seller. But you never know.”
Penny: How do you want customers to feel when they wear your clothes?
Alice: "Really happy and comfortable and relaxed. I hope they become a staple part of their everyday wardrobe and that they get the odd compliment on them that reminds them how great they're looking! I wrote a quote down the other day that someone said, it was something like "You've made me excited about my holiday now!". That was great!”
Penny: How do you feel when you see people wearing your prints?
Alice: "I never get tired of this, it makes me really happy. Actually most days a guy cycles his kids into school and goes past our house and he often has one of our embroidered jackets on and that is a nice way to start the day, seeing him. I don’t think he knows it's me who designed it.
Once Robbie and I were on a bus going through Manchester and someone was wearing one of our new jumpsuits. It was quite a while ago now. We were so amazed to see it out in the wild!"
Penny: Why have you chosen the fabrics you have?
Alice: "We started working with a new supplier this year so that we can explore more sustainable fabric choices and try some new ones. So we have some beautiful light organic cottons and a lot is made from a beautiful new Khadi which is hand woven. We have one linen item which is our Ammie Dress. This has meant we have a slight rise in prices this season. I feel more confident in the craftsmanship this time, so I hope the pieces will be more durable than they may have been previously."
Penny: What do you enjoy most about the process and which parts do you find the most challenging?
Alice: "I really love all parts of the process, now that I've been doing this quite a while every part of it has pleasing elements and stressful bits. Receiving the first samples and seeing them on the body is really exciting. The photoshoots always bring everything to life and that is wonderful. The printing process feels such a privilege, that these printers are printing my designs for us. The initial design process when I'm painting all the starting points is lovely. And actually in Crete last year when I did these designs, my daughter Honey and I would be up before the boys and we would sit outside in the morning sun and both be painting together. So it definitely seemed right that she had a print named after her this year."
Penny: What is some feedback that we have had from customers that has influenced a design decision?
Alice: "I really like feedback, both good and bad, it's really helpful. We are slowly perfecting the shapes, it's hard to get the sizing correct across all the range of sizes and we have worked on the plus sizes this year a lot. We have also never really nailed a lot of the garments for the more petit customers. So this summer I’m excited to say we have a new XXS size which is shorter and smaller. So we hope this will now work a lot better.”
Penny: Block and screen printing - why do you choose to work in these two mediums?
Alice: “I really love the organic-ness of both these styles of printing. There are always slight imperfections which just makes them more real and no two garments are ever the same. With the block printing you can see the little dots which mark out where the next block needs to be placed. It's fascinating to think that each layer of colour in these designs has been printed one after the other and by such talented printers, it takes 7 years to train as a professional block printer. Then the carving of the blocks is another skill in itself. The same methods have been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Some more detailed prints do come out clearer in the screen process, I love this too though and having done a lot of this myself over the years I know it takes a lot of skill to get the colours to layer perfectly without messing up the rest of the fabric. Which I did a lot!”
Penny: What is the approach to ‘sustainability’ for this collection?
Alice: “If you have been a customer of ours for a while, then you may have noticed that we haven’t been doing a seasonal pre-order anymore. One of the reasons we stopped is because it wasn’t really as popular pre-Christmas as it was in January. But this is too late for us to order our new season collection and it ended up with us not getting collections until May. We are now looking at how items have sold in previous years and we order the same amount that sold at full price plus 20%.
So our production sizes have shrunk right back down, we have never made more than 70 of one piece, but now we are doing around 35/40 pieces and having more drops. Then items won’t get lost in the large collections, giving everything its chance to shine!
We are using a lot more organic cotton, all our fabrics are 100% natural and we really try to cut plastic at all stages of the process.”