Pawprint Family’s Charlotte Russell on the benefits of bringing brands into badges

Charlotte, it’s great to catch up. First off, can you give us some background to Pawprint Family?
In 2016, my husband Jamie and I established Pawprint Badges which has since gone on to become the brand at the heart of Pawprint Family, a collective of four brands driven by a shared mission: to make adventure and reward accessible to everyone.

With a background in teaching and business – plus our own experiences as Ranger and Explorer leaders spanning over 27 years – we highlighted the significance of combining fun and learning.

So your time in the Girl Guides helped shape Pawprint?
Yes, during my time as a Ranger Leader, we needed to raise money for camping equipment. I had the idea to create a badge to sell to other groups for fundraising. This – along with another three badges in the set – went onto raise over £11,000. It wasn’t long after meeting Jamie that he helped bring the business to life, going from supporting just my Ranger unit to a mission of supporting all young people. This realisation inspired us to create the Pawprint family of brands, with the aim of bringing together the best of both worlds.

At the heart of our endeavours lies Pawprint Badges, where our team creates and provides a range of free activity ideas and resources for leaders, teachers, and parents. We believe in empowering young people by offering a diverse and inclusive range of collectible badges that facilitate skill development across various disciplines, including reading, sports, outdoor adventures, and seasonal celebrations.

I know that Pawprint Family fund a charitable trust. What is your motivation behind this?
With a mission to make adventuring dreams more accessible and affordable for the youth, especially during the cost-of-living crisis, we created the Pawprint Trust back in 2016 which helps young people aged 11 to 25 to receive monetary grants that bring them one step closer to embarking on adventures they wouldn’t have access to before. To achieve this, every sale made through Pawprint’s badges, trails and tales sees 1% of turnover donated to the trust, which then opens annually to young people and grants money to help their adventures come to life.

Over the years, we have had the wonderful opportunity to oversee so many young people take on adventures. Beneficiaries from previous years have put their grants towards a range of impressive feats, including an expedition to Malawi to build a community centre for a local village, a World Challenge to Borneo and an Antarctic exploration trip. We are just about to announce the latest recipients who entered this year’s Pawprint Trust scheme. We can’t wait to see how these impressive young individuals use their grant to fund adventures of a lifetime.

Great stuff. And you also work with partner charities too?
Yes, over the last seven years we’ve had the opportunity to develop partnerships with several charities, including World Book Day, The Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB. These partnerships allow us to support causes that we’re passionate about, provide opportunities for our customers to develop their wider skills and build brand awareness through joint marketing. On occasion, this makes things more challenging as often charities have a more complex decision-making structure, however we’re pleased and proud to be able to support charities in this way and demonstrate a new way of fundraising for potential future partners.

You have entered into a number of licensing deals recently. What prompted that move?
It all started back in 2021 with a Gruffalo badge! It had long since been my ambition to create an official Gruffalo challenge badge as a I knew this would be popular with our existing customers, but Jamie’s background in retail buying offered him a greater insight into the opportunities a licensing deal would present.

We welcomed our first license with Magic Light Pictures, which went on to form the basis of our plans to create a wholesale business. Since then, we have continued to grow our licensing opportunities and have collaborated with renowned brands like the NSPCC, Wallace & Gromit and Percy the Park Keeper, ensuring we deliver household favourites to our audience. It’s fair to say that licensing has also acted as a catalyst creating many new opportunities with partners.

How so?
Well, one example is our license with Aardman. This has opened many exciting conversations with Natural England and Save the Children, both of which we hope will help us further our work in schools as part of our retail business.

Working with other licensees has also opened doors into bigger attractions and organisations such as Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Merlin Entertainments. Our wider licensing programme has also started to raise our business’ profile as a manufacturer. The launch of our wholesale range at Spring Fair in Birmingham brought us new conversations for bespoke ranges at several national and regional attractions, helping retailers to boost sales over peak visitor/tourist season.

How have you sold the opportunity of working with Pawprint Family to brand owners?
Our specialist approach – focusing on the niche of badges – and our developed retail audience have been the main selling points for licensors. With our product development experience from the last seven years, we’re able to ensure that we get a really high-quality product and represent the brands in the best possible way. This combined with our social media reach and strong email newsletter present marketing opportunities over and above other licensees, putting Pawprint Family in a fairly unique position.

You specialise in producing patches and pin badges. Design-wise, what are the challenges when working with brands on these kinds of product?
We specialise in embroidered badges for sew-on as we love the opportunities this provides to add additional depth and texture to the designs. However, it also presents its limitations… We have to consider how much detail to build into the products when working with licensed brands. The detail often dictates the size of the final product, so we tend to start with any character or text and work out how big they need to be before considering anything else.

For pins, we typically use enamel as we feel the quality is superior to alternative methods of manufacture. Again, this presents challenges when designing with minimum sizes and line weights, so we do also take these limitations into consideration when selecting brands to approach and work with.

We price our products competitively in the market in a bid to ensure they remain as accessible as possible in line with our wider brand values. Quality will always be the main point of difference for us. In embroidery we typically shy away from cheaper fill stitches and build in as much texture and detail as we can. For example, scales on Zog, knitted texture on Wallace’s jumper and a woolly texture on Shaun the Sheep.

Speaking of Aardman, let’s dive into those designs. Talk us through the collaboration.
Aardman have been a pleasure to work with since starting our licensing journey. The team have been supportive, while also presenting us with a number of further opportunities to work with other licensees and partners.

Initially, after signing the license, we get access to the artwork and start to plan out our product range. These designs are then submitted for approval and there is some back and forth discussion around specification, textures and colours before we get sampling. This is always my favourite part! I love seeing the flat designs come to life and getting the feedback from the brand.

Ben at Aardman clearly shares our passion for patches and pins so it’s great to speak to him about the products as they develop. Once everything is signed off, we then go to production and await the final products with anticipation.

I’m excited to see where this license goes moving forward as there are so many conversations happening at the moment!

There seems to be a growing demand for these types of products. What do you think is driving this?
Firstly, personalisation and customisation. Whether its badges, sew-on patches, pins… All offer a great opportunity for individuals, groups and organisations such as tourist locations to personalise their clothing, bags and accessories. What’s more, badges make for great pocket money purchases that customers can take away from their favourite attractions and locations, as a keepsake, to remember their adventures.

Secondly is the consumer demand for more socially conscious products. Typically, as consumers we’ve always opted for cheap, plastic purchases, but over the last few years we’ve seen organisations bring sew on patches and pins back into their retail ranges as a long-lasting and more eco-friendly option to the previously popular plastic pencil sharpener. We’re also, as a result of our experiences in lockdown, becoming more connected to making memories and spending time together. Patches and pins provide a long-lasting reminder of these experiences and create a keepsake for the future.

Lastly, our badges have been expertly designed to help parents, educators and youth organisations save time by providing all the free resources needed. Amid a cost-of-living crisis and parents feeling burn-out during the summer holidays after having to juggle work and entertaining the children, we feel that there is a real scope for badges to continue to help parents during the summer months in delivering adventures for their children.

What new launches from you should we be looking out for from you for the rest of the year?
We have already had several exciting launches take place this year from World Book Day, Zog, Wildlife Trust to even most recently, the Big Coronation Lunch! We worked in partnership with Eden Project Communities to create the official Coronation Big Lunch badge and activity pack.

Looking ahead for the rest of the year, we are excited to launch our brand-new Natural England partnership and start launching more of our wholesale ranges on our own retail channels, but we can’t reveal too much just yet so watch this space.

Finally, can you give us a top three of patches you have seen, owned or developed. What did you like about them?
As a badge collector this is a mean question as there are so many to choose from!

From my personal collection, I once swapped a badge at an event with a Scout from Uttoxeter. I wasn’t aware but malted milk biscuits originate there and the badge was shaped to look like a biscuit! This really stuck in my mind and it’s still one of my favourites as it’s so iconic.

Aside from that we’ve developed some pretty cool badges. In our own range, the Wild West Adventures badge has to be up there as there’s a couple of different texture stitches to bring the sand and wood to life.

As my third choice, from our wholesale range, there are so many to choose from, but I have to say I love the Magnificent Broom patch from our Room on the Broom collection. For starters it’s an XL patch so it comes on an A4 backing card and the detail in the design is awesome. It’s also my daughter’s favourite illustration by Axel Scheffler and it never fails to get a “Wooooow!” when we read the story so seeing the design brought to life as a badge really was magical!

Great choices. Thanks again Charlotte.