Kids' Print & Pattern Trends for Autumn Winter

If you're in the middle of planning your next Autumn Winter range, you’ll know how much thought goes into getting the mood just right.

As designers, we spend a lot of time looking at market shifts, collecting new ideas, and chatting with brand owners about what’s actually moving off the shelves. When it comes to kidswear, prints are almost always the biggest driver of sales, especially in autumn when cosy layering pieces and sleepwear are in high demand.

So, whether you’re developing a newborn range, organic toddler loungewear, or nursery accessories, here is what we’re seeing brands and buyers source for Autumn/Winter.

What’s Trending for Autumn/Winter?

1. Folklore & Forest Stories

Nostalgic storytelling prints always do well in autumn, but right now there’s a real shift toward hand-drawn, folk-inspired wildlife. Think playful woodland animals paired with oak leaves, acorns, and painted berries. This trend is moving away from clean, cartoonish graphics in favour of softer, vintage-style illustrations with an artisan feel.

Key colours: Warm cinnamon, ochre, moss green, and cornflower blue on oatmeal or darker hued bases.

2. Moody Nostalgic Florals

Ditsy florals aren't just for spring. Grounded in deeper, earthier tones, micro-botanicals and pressed wildflowers bring an elevated aesthetic to winter girlswear collections. They work brilliantly both as hero garments and as supporting pieces, and work well accross matching womenswear or homeware ranges too.

Key colours: Dusty rose, burnt terracotta, plum, muted olive, and cream with pops of vibrant greens

3. Retro Novelty & Playful Heritage

If your brand aesthetic is more upbeat and energetic, novelty prints are taking inspiration from 70s retro nostalgia. Think painterly stripes, hand-drawn checkerboards, vintage toys, and fun character motifs. This trend adds a bit of lighthearted fun to winter dressing and a memorable USP for your brand, which parents love for both toddlers and older kids.

Key colours: Tomato reds, teal, rust orange, and soft charcoal.

Looking for Prints for Your Upcoming Range?

We work with kids' brand founders and design teams in two ways:

1. Ready-to-Use Prints: You can license our exclusive, ready to use prints straight from our private online catalogue.

2. Custom Briefs: If you have a specific theme, trend, or colour palette in mind, we can design custom prints to your brief.

If you’d like to see what’s inside the new AW catalogue or chat through a custom brief, we’d love to connect.

Click here to get in touch or pop us an email with your brief - we'd love to hear what you're working on!

5 Signs Your Childrenswear Brand Needs a Brand Refresh (And How to Do It Right)

When you first launched your childrenswear business, your visual identity, website, and early product designs were most likely built on a mix of passion, determination, lots of late nights and whatever budget you had available at the time.

Fast-forward a few years and your business has grown, you understand your customer base far better, and your products have evolved. Quite possibly, with the daily demands of running a young business, your branding and visual identity hasn’t been high on your priority list. Does the look and feel of your brand match the business you are running today?

A brand refresh isn't about throwing away everything you’ve built, it’s about refining your visual language, elevating your print direction, and aligning your design output with where your brand is heading. Here are five clear signs it might be time for a brand refresh, and how to make the transition seamlessly:

1. Your Visuals No Longer Match Your Price Point

If you’ve raised your prices or upgraded to higher-quality fabrics, but your logo, packaging, and graphics still feel a bit ‘DIY’ there’s going to be a disconnect for buyers.

To justify a premium price point, every touchpoint, from your garment labels and swing tags to your prints and patterns, needs to communicate quality. Refining your brand typography, color palette, and illustrations reassures parents that your products are worth the investment.

2. Your Prints Feel Inconsistent Across Collections

In the early days of running a brand, it's common to buy off-the-shelf stock prints or rely on stock pattern fabric from your manufacturer. While this may have filled a gap in your range initially, it often leads to a mismatched brand aesthetic where one collection feels vintage and romantic, while the next feels bold and graphic.

If your collections are lacking a signature style, it may be time to invest in custom artwork. Working with an experienced designer allows you to build an exclusive print handwriting for your brand, giving your ranges a recognisable, cohesive look season after season. Tie this in with a signature print for your packaging and custom illustrations on your website and socials for a unique brand aesthetic that will help differentiate and elevate your kidswear brand.

3. Your Audience Has Evolved, Or You Want to Attract Stockists

Maybe you started out targeting newborn gift-buyers, but you’ve noticed your biggest sales now come from parents buying toddler loungewear. Or maybe you're aiming to move from direct-to-consumer sales into wholesale and boutique stockists. Stockists look for clear, well-curated brand stories. If your current branding feels a bit dated or unfocused, a brand refresh helps clarify your market positioning, making your brand far more appealing to retail buyers.

4. You’re Struggling to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

The childrenswear space is vibrant and creative, but it’s also competitive. If you notice competitor brands using similar stock graphics, color palettes, or typography, your brand can easily get lost in a crowded marketplace.

A strategic brand re-design focuses on finding your unique visual point of difference. Whether that’s through custom print stories, a unique new logo design or a distinct brand voice, standing out requires intentional design choices.

5. You Feel Uninspired by Your Own Socials and Website

As a founder, your enthusiasm feeds directly into your business. If you find yourself hesitating to post on socials or feeling reluctant to share your website link because the design feels outdated, that's a good indicator that your brand identity needs a lift. When your branding feels fresh, modern, and aligned with your vision, showcasing your products becomes effortless again.

How to Refresh Your Brand Without Losing Your Identity

A successful refresh should feel like an evolution of your existing brand, not a complete surprise to your loyal existing customers. The aim isn’t to tear everything down, but to elevate your existing visual positioning so it accurately reflects where your business is today.

Here is how to update your brand identity thoughtfully:

Audit What Works: Keep your recognisable core elements (like a signature colour or a key motif) and refine the elements that feel dated.

Upgrade Your Brand Assets: Elevate your typography, primary and secondary logo suites, and brand patterns. Ensuring your packaging, hang tags, unboxing assets, and web design all speak the same visual language instantly raises your perceived value.

Align Your Digital Touchpoints: Bring consistency to your website layout, email newsletters, and social media templates. A clean, cohesive digital presence builds trust quickly with both new parents and potential wholesale stockists.

Clarify Your Brand Messaging: As your business grows, your brand story often evolves too. Revisit your core values, mission statement, and website copy to ensure your brand voice clearly communicates why your brand is the best choice for modern families.

Let’s Elevate Your Kids’ Brand

If your brand is ready for its next chapter, we can help. At The Kids Design Consultancy, we specialise in helping brand owners refresh their visual identity, refine their brand strategy, and develop exclusive designs that make their products stand out in a busy market.

Whether you produce childrenswear, nursery goods, toys, or lifestyle accessories, get in touch to discuss how we can elevate your branding and prints for the upcoming season.

How to Start a Kids' Clothing Brand: A Step-by-Step Guide

So, you’ve got a brilliant idea for a childrenswear brand - maybe you’re a parent who can’t find fun and high-quality clothes for your own little ones, or perhaps you’ve spotted a clear gap in the market for playful, sustainable kidswear.

Starting a kids’ clothing line is such a rewarding journey, but if you’re coming into the industry without a fashion background, the process of turning your ideas into real products can feel a bit daunting. Between garment fits, print placements, safety standards, and tech packs, there’s a lot to navigate, and thats where we can help!

So lets break it down and de-mystify the process…

Step 1: Define Your Niche and Brand Foundations

Before diving into fabric swatches and sketches, you need a clear understanding of who your brand is for. In childrenswear, remember that you’re designing for two distinct audiences: the child who wears the garment, and the parent who buys it. Ask yourself some key questions:

Who is your ideal customer? You can’t appeal to everyone, so be clear who you are selling to and why.

What age bracket are you targeting? Newborns, toddlers, and older kids all have very different functional design requirements.

What are your core brand values? Defining your tone of voice, visual identity, and core mission early on makes design decisions much easier down the line.

Step 2: Build a Cohesive Range Plan

It’s easy to get carried away wanting to launch with fifty different styles, but starting small is usually the best move for new brand founders. A range plan maps out exactly what pieces you’ll create for your first collection and how they will work together, then you can easily identify gaps in the range and check your colours and prints work well together.

Building a focused range can help to keep your initial manufacturing costs manageable while giving you enough variety to present a cohesive collection to prospective stockists and online customers. Plus having a clear visual will help keep everything clear in your head and easier to stay on target.

Step 3: Develop Your Prints, Patterns, and Graphics

Fun prints and graphics are often the main driver of sales in childrenswear, and can set your label apart by bringing a unique style and personality to your brand. Whether you want hand-painted illustrations or bold all over patterns, your artwork needs to be created in a professional print-ready format, ensuring your factory can easily produce your designs.

Step 4: Create Factory-Ready Tech Packs

If you take only one piece of advice from this guide, let it be this: don’t skip your tech packs! We know theyre not exciting to create, and can seem daunting but they can make the difference between multiple rounds of poor samples and a smooth production process.

A tech pack is essentially the blueprint for your garment. It includes detailed drawings (cads), measurement charts, seam finishes, fabric specifications, pantone colour references, and artwork placement guides. Factories rely entirely on these documents to build your samples. Without a thorough, professional tech pack, you risk receiving samples that look completely different from what you envisioned—wasting both time and money.

Step 5: Sourcing, Sampling, and Safety

Once your tech packs and print files are ready, it’s time to send them to your chosen factory. Choosing a factory to work with can be a long and tricky process (maybe the subject for another blog post!) but the right factory partner can make the production process smoother and easier to navigate.

When sourcing fabrics for childrenswear, soft textures, wash durability, and safety compliance are essential. Children's clothing is subject to strict legal regulations regarding drawstrings, button attachment strength, and fabric flammability, so always check that your chosen factory is familiar with kidswear safety guidelines in your target markets.

You’ll go through a few rounds of sampling (proto samples, fit samples, and salesman samples) to refine the fit and finish before signing off on bulk production.

Ready to Bring Your Kids’ Brand to Life?

Launching a brand is a learning curve, but you don't have to navigate it alone. At The Kids Design Consultancy, we partner with new founders to provide complete design support—from initial brand strategy and print creation through to factory-ready tech packs, fit sessions and helping you find the perfect factory.

If you’re ready to turn your ideas into your dream brand, get in touch with us today to chat about your project, we’d love to hear from you!

Maison et Objet 2026: Our Autumn Winter Print Collection

The summer holidays have officially arrived, but behind the scenes at our kids’ print design agency, things are anything but quiet. While the sunny days usually tempt us to slow down, our studio is buzzing with energy as we put the finishing touches on our brand new Autumn Winter print collection. We are excited to share that we will be heading across the Channel to Paris this autumn to exhibit again at Maison et Objet 2026 trade show from September 10th to September 14th, 2026, held at the Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre.

You will find the two of us soaking up the creative atmosphere in the dedicated Maison et Objet Pattern Lab space. This curated area is always a haven for surface pattern lovers, and we could not be more thrilled to be a part of it this season, where we will be showcasing our latest line of custom print designs for kids’ brands, apparel, nursery textiles, and lifestyle products.

Preparing for a trade show of this scale is always a big undertaking. Over the past few months, our studio tables have been overflowing with hand-drawn sketches, colour swatches, and endless pattern trials. For this upcoming collection, we wanted to capture the magical spirit of the cooler months. You can expect a rich tapestry of playful narrative prints, sweet character illustrations, warm seasonal colour palettes, and timeless geometric patterns designed to complement a wide variety of product lines. Whether you are looking for soft, gentle tones for newborn collections or vibrant, energetic motifs for older kids, there is something in this new collection to spark your imagination.

Heading over to France for Maison et Objet is always one of the highlights of our year. There is a special kind of magic in packing up our physical samples, setting up our exhibition space, and seeing our work come to life on the show floor. More than anything, we love the personal side of trade shows. It provides us with a wonderful opportunity to step out from behind our digital drawing boards and meet the passionate people behind the brands we admire.

We would absolutely love for you to drop by our space in the Pattern Lab, say hello, and explore the new prints in person. We are always keen to chat with fellow creators, brand founders, product developers, and retail buyers. Whether you are actively hunting for fresh artwork for your next seasonal drop, looking for custom print options tailored to your brand’s unique aesthetic, or simply wanting to share ideas over a quick coffee between show halls, we’d love you to stop by our stand in Hall 6 to say hi.

Of course, we completely understand that travel schedules and busy workloads mean not everyone can make the trip to Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre this September. If you cannot attend the show in person, please do not worry about missing out on the new releases. We want to make sure everyone has access to our latest work, no matter where you are based in the world.

You can easily get in touch with us through our contact page to set up a virtual appointment with our team. We will be delighted to host a private digital walkthrough of the entire Autumn Winter collection online from September onwards. During these one-on-one sessions, we can talk you through the inspiration behind each print, show you scale and colour variations, and discuss how the artwork can be customised to suit your specific product range.

As the show date approaches, we will be sharing a few sneaky behind-the-scenes previews of what we are working on, so keep an eye out as we finalise our preparations. Thank you as always for following along on our creative journey. We hope you have a fabulous summer, and we look forward to connecting with you either in Paris or online very soon.

Our new trend guide is out now!

Our new SS24 Trend and Inspiration guide is out now and we’re so excited to share it with you. We’ve gathered an amazing selection of inspiration from brands, artists and photographers and curated 3 meticulously researched key trends to take you through the season.

Each key trend features Pantone colour palettes, 2 royalty-free prints, and a capsule CAD collection that can be downloaded and edited to make designing your new collection that little bit easier. Alongside this are 14 bite-sized micro colour, mood and trend boards to help you understand the latest trends and how to apply them to your brand.

We know how important good trend resources are when planning and designing new products, and we also know how expensive they can be! Many trend platforms are simply out of reach for small businesses. That’s why we created our inspiration guides - targeted trend research at an affordable price of £300, to help you create your best collection yet. This is a challenging time for independent businesses but we want to empower you with sustainable trend information that works for your brand by sharing our ideas and we hope, inspiring yours.

Want to know if our trend guide is right for you? get in touch on our contact form with any questions

Welcome to The Kids Design Consultancy Blog: Design, Sustainability, and Inspiration

Hi there, and a very warm welcome to The Kids Design Consultancy blog. We are so glad you found your way to our little corner of the internet. We created this dedicated space to share everything that is currently inspiring us in our London studio each week, from upcoming seasonal trends and creative mood boards to key childrenswear brands that have caught our eye and must-see exhibitions around the city and beyond. Whether you are a fellow creator, an established brand founder, or someone just starting out on the exciting journey of building your very first kids collection, we hope this blog becomes a trusted source of inspiration, practical advice, and fresh design ideas for you.

To kick things off properly, we thought we should introduce ourselves. We are Bronwen and Fanny, two design professionals and mothers who live, work, and create right here in London. Our partnership first began when we joined forces to found an award winning ethical childrenswear brand called Petite Albion. Building that business from the ground up gave us a deep, hands-on understanding of what it actually takes to launch, design, market, and grow a successful brand in the modern market. Since then, we have both worked across a wide spectrum of the creative industry, gathering a wealth of practical skills, industry insights, and specialised expertise that we now bring to every client project we collaborate on.

Bronwen comes from a background in knitwear, textile design, and fashion design across both kids’ and womenswear ranges. Over the course of her career, she has designed for a variety of popular high street and independent fashion names. Her expertise lies in understanding garment construction, manufacturing, and creating practical yet stylish shapes that kids love to wear and parents love to buy. She knows precisely how to balance aesthetic beauty with the real-world functionality that parents look for in children's clothing.

Fanny, who is originally from France, brings a distinctive illustrative flair and visual design mastery to our team. As a graphic designer and illustrator, her diverse portfolio includes work for gifting and party brand Meri Meri, as well as social enterprise embroidery specialists Fine Cell Work. On top of her agency and consultancy experience, Fanny also ran her own quirky kids accessories label, Tcutcha Socks, giving her a real understanding of niche product development, brand identity, and print storytelling.

Together, as a dedicated kids design agency, our combined backgrounds mean we cover almost every single angle of product creation. We work seamlessly alongside brand founders to guide them from initial concept art, trend research, and bespoke pattern illustration through to technical garment packs and final production preparation.

At the core of everything we do lies a deep, unwavering commitment to great design and sustainable values. We truly believe that creating beautiful, engaging products should never come at the expense of people or the planet. How and who our products are made by is just as important to us as how they look on the shelf or on a website. We are immensely passionate about using sustainable fabrics and eco-friendly organic fibres, choosing certified ethical manufacturing partners, and designing high-quality, durable pieces that are built to withstand the test of time and endless play. Our ultimate goal is simple: by helping brands create better products and encouraging consumers to buy more mindfully, we can contribute to leaving a healthier, happier planet for future generations.

We are so genuinely excited to embark on this blog journey with you, sharing our love for all things childrenswear design and collaborating with visionary brand owners to bring their creative goals to life. Over the coming months, we will be using this space to dive into detailed design guides, behind-the-scenes looks at our print collections, trade show updates, and thoughts on sustainable manufacturing.

If you have a project in mind, are looking for custom print artwork, or need expert design guidance to shape your next seasonal range, we would love to hear from you. Please do not hesitate to reach out directly via our contact page to start a conversation with us about how we can work together.

Do not forget to join our growing community on social media by following us on Instagram and Pinterest, where we regularly share our latest studio updates, behind-the-scenes sketches, and daily visual inspirations. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we look forward to sharing more design stories with you very soon.