Boden – great clothes, shame about the App

Boden’s new iPad app has left me feeling a bit blaa.

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s nothing to do with this season’s clothes. As ever, with a careful eye, it’s relatively easy to select a few choice pieces that avoid the brand’s yummy mummy reputation and really deliver on the quality/value front.

What the iPad lacks is any clear consideration of how shoppers engage with Boden’s traditional catalogue.

I know I’m not alone among Boden consumers in savouring the prospect of some free time to sit down with the new catalogue. I make myself a cup of coffee and flick through the pages drawing up a short list of items that catch my fancy; I might even turn down the corners of the pages. When truly organised I’ve been known to make a list in the back of the catalogue of items that I want to buy with corresponding page numbers. I might even rip out the pages. Whatever the method, and whether shopping online or going to Boden’s Park Royal store, I need this shopping list. I might repeat this process several times before I make a purchase. I might change my mind about certain items after viewing them a second or third time. I might go online to read reviews and find that people have concerns about the cut, colour or quality. And if I go in store armed with my shopping list I might find, as is often the case, that the colour in the catalogue and online bears absolutely no relation to the actual colour and that the cut is totally wrong for my shape.

Sadly, the app takes none of this behaviour into account. As I experimented with it over the last few days I kept hoping that I’d come across some sort of equivalent to my page turning, page ripping or shopping list/page number annotation habit. There is absolutely nothing to reflect this shopping ritual. I’m sure a good number of loyal Boden customers have developed their own rituals around the arrival of the Boden catalogue. It’s such a shame to see nothing of this kind built into the app. I wonder if Boden even posed the question. Perhaps it will come in a future upgrade.

I for one will remain with the catalogue and use my iPad to buy via my browser, bypassing the Boden app entirely. Moreover it seems to include only a very small collection of the clothes that appear in the catalogue and navigating through the app on the off chance that my item of choice is included would be a pretty tedious process. There’s not even the facility to enlarge the images that appear in the app – this has to be done by clicking through to the online store. The token video featuring kids’ clothing is weak too. Quite simply the navigation is clumsy with too much scrolling involved – purchasing items that feature in a lifestyle shot sometimes requires scrolling down through 4 or 5 frames within the same section, rather than jumping directly to the purchase link for those items. I might have missed a trick, but I don’t think so. And if I have, isn’t the app making me work a little too hard?

Come on Johnnie, you can do better.