The brief

Workwear B2B is a sea of stock photos. Clipboard, fluorescent jacket, faint grin, mid-distance sky. Anyone could swap one logo for another and you wouldn't notice. The old Clothing House site looked like the rest of the category. Shu took one look at it and said no.

So we rebuilt it.

The vision

Shu's pitch was simple. The product range of any major UK workwear site, with a premium experience and our own individual vibe and attitude, followed up by genuine personal customer service. All done in a Bay38 / Clothing House way, meaning if it doesn't carry the voice and the standard, it doesn't go out. That's the bar he set, and that's the bar we're holding.

How Shu works

Working with Shu means a few things you pick up fast.

"That'll do" doesn't exist in his vocabulary. If something isn't right, it doesn't ship. If it ships and isn't right, it gets pulled. He'd rather miss a deadline by half a day than put out something he'd be embarrassed to look at on Monday.

Everything's there for a reason. Every button colour, every line of copy, every four pixels of spacing. If you can't explain why it's there, it gets cut. You'd think that slows things down. Doesn't. It just stops anyone wasting a Friday on a feature that didn't need to exist.

He holds the line on tone harder than anyone. Half the work on this rebuild was Shu saying "no, that's too corporate" or "no, that sticker's not funny enough" until we landed it. Owen had to draw the elbow sticker twice. Worth it.

He's a walking pop-culture index. Tolkien references show up in his project naming. Three decades of UK music feeds the palette. He reads more streetwear than B2B, and some of that bleeds into the brand whether he means it to or not. Probably for the best.

The concept

Stop trying to look corporate. Most workwear buyers are trades people, ops managers, hospitality teams, sport clubs. They don't want corporate. They want clear, fast, and human. So that became the brief: a site that reads more like a workshop noticeboard than a B2B catalogue, voice that doesn't sound like an HR document, and a visual identity built around something only we have, a paper-cut mascot.

Owen executed the graphics. Beanie Boy, the Did You Know stickers, the themed sprites for each category, the photography direction, the whole visual system. Half the work was holding the line on tone. When something's working, you don't dilute it.

The build

Behind the visual rebrand, the site got a full structural overhaul. New mega menu, proper category landing pages, hero rebuilt for mobile-first, internal navigation rewired so links actually go where the labels say they go. Quiet stuff that doesn't show up in screenshots, but you'd notice it within a few seconds of using the old site.

"When something's working, you don't dilute it." Shu, roughly forty times during this rebuild.

Bay38

Shu runs Bay38 as Head of Digital. The agency does this kind of work for clients across sport, hospitality, retail and trades. Concept, build, content, paid media, growth. Clothing House is one of those clients, and we're the in-house team.

If your site's been quietly underperforming and you want a second opinion, that's literally what they do. Contact details in the footer.

What's coming

This blog. More themed Beanie Boys per category. Better photography across the product range. A review automation flow. Wider product range, deeper category coverage, the same personal customer service that actually picks up the phone. The work is never finished, that's the whole job.

If you're a customer reading this, thanks for sticking around. If you're a buyer reading this, hi.