Boss Design website

The brief

Boss Design make contract furniture in the West Midlands and sell it through showrooms in London, Manchester, Chicago, Dubai and Tokyo. Their furniture goes into workplaces and venues around the world, from offices to Everyman Cinemas.

Their previous site was designed elsewhere and built by Gold Top Collective, the web studio our founder co-owns. It worked, and Gold Top had handed it over with a full set of templates, a training session and a how-to guide so the Boss team could run it themselves.

But the design was mostly text on white, and for a business whose product is almost entirely visual, that undersold it. Boss wanted a site with far more life in it, one that led with the furniture and could be rolled out across every region they sell in.

So the brief was a new website design for every page, with the UK site first and the other regions to follow.

The approach

Gold Top had already spent a whole build inside Boss’s thinking. We knew how the products, projects and sustainability pages were structured, what the team edited every week and what they never touched. That meant we knew where they would bend and where they would not before a single page was drawn.

The design gives the furniture the room the old site did not. Every page now opens on one of Boss’s own photographs or on a single flat colour, and the heading is split either side of a thin rule: Discover, Our Products. Our, Showrooms. It is a small device, but it runs through the whole site, so a visitor moving from a product page to a showroom page always knows they are in the same place.

The fabric library needed its own thinking. Specifiers choose upholstery as carefully as the chair, so each fabric has its own card showing its type, brand and banding, and the products it is already approved on. A designer can start from a fabric and find the furniture, or start from the furniture and see what it can be covered in.

The design went through with no amends to the look and feel.

What was done

We designed every page of the new bossdesign.com, from the homepage and product directory to the project stories, the showrooms and the fabric library. Gold Top built it.

The site and the fabric library both went live, the UK first and then the other regions. Today bossdesign.com runs in UK and US English, French, German and Japanese, so a specifier in Chicago, Dubai or Tokyo sees the same furniture presented the same way as one in London.

For Boss, it closes a loop. The same people who built the previous site were trusted to design the one that replaced it, and the second site carries everything the team learned running the first. Crushing on the design, Gold Top on the build.