Judi Bevan

The Hooray who became a middle-class style guru

Judi Bevan meets Johnnie Boden, who shook off the stereotypes of his Eton, Oxford and City background to build an iconic mail-order clothing business

A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and was a prominent member of the hell-raising Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Both he and Cameron have classy, team-playing wives and three young children apiece. There, however, the similarity ends.

At just 45, Boden is a few years older than Cameron and diffident rather than slick. While the Tory leader embraced the world of business and spin in his early career as a PR man, Boden rejected conventional employment after a wretched few years in the City. He failed to see the point of the deal-obsessed world of stockbroking and investment banking. ‘I really didn’t get it,’ he says in the deep plummy tones so familiar to customers who ring to order the latest ‘funky cardigan’ or ‘fruity’ children’s T-shirt from the Boden catalogue. ‘And I was no good at it — every share I recommended went down. By the time I left the City I was unemployable.’ Even a posting to Wall Street in the heady late 1980s failed to stir him. ‘I thought it would be fantastic and all the girls would fancy a bloke with an English accent but I was miserable,’ he murmurs.

An unexpected legacy from an uncle enabled him to resign and buy a flat in Bayswater with money to spare. Many would have squandered it, but he spent a year talking to entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Julian Metcalfe of Pret A Manger, reading business books and even teaching at Hill House, the Chelsea private school. All the time he pondered whether he had it in him to start his own business.

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