East End Prints Founder Helen Edwards talks about our Summer 2024 collection

We had the pleasure of interviewing the founder and CEO of East End Prints, Helen Edwards, on our summer 2024 range. Read on to learn about Helen's inspiration, favourite artists and more. 

What was your inspiration behind the Summer 2024 range? 

The range manager, Sophia, and I work together on pulling in ideas that we see happening within the fashion and home interiors industry. We're looking at the colourways, we're looking at styles that we've seen. 

At the moment, a very much painterly, hand-drawn vibe is in, and we've seen this come through in a lot of kitchen prints, for example. There are also specific colourways such as pink and orange and green and pink that fit together perfectly so we pull those together in the collections. 

If you had to choose, who are some of your favourite artists from this campaign? 

Tough question, our independent artists are the driving force behind East End Prints so it's hard to pick just one. 

One of my favourite artists from our collection last Christmas, I still consider that quite new as we've been running so long haha, would be Poet and Painter. 

I think her work is absolutely brilliant, it talks to me. I think I'm one of her ideal customers and I was previously buying her cards before we even signed her up. So that's a perfect example of somebody I love. 

I think that the idea of mixing in humour with the hand-drawn feel is really popular at the moment, I get the feeling these artists are creating these designs in their studio and then scanning them in and getting them onto our product. 

Another of my favourites would be new artist, Stephie Cardona. We've seen more and more food prints on the rise and Stephie's work reminds me of New York, Brooklyn-style foodie places. 

There have been many styles and trends around noodles and ramen prints as well as pizzas and the dumplings. I think it's all the popular kind of street food that people are having. We've now seen that filtered down onto our food collections as well. We've got some fabulous new work in from existing artists as well, such as Dan Hobday. 

Another artist I love is Julia Walck, we launched some new prints with her at the start of the year. The kind of collage montage of photography has been another big trend that we absolutely love. It's quite surreal and it goes back to that sort of, cut-and-paste idea of going into the raw and to the real. 

As you've been in the game for 14 years now, how does it feel looking back on how much East End prints has grown? 

Yeah, well I've actually been in the game longer than you've been on the planet. 

So, my first publishing job was in 2000, and that's really where I developed all the knowledge to do with artist licensing and copyrights. That was a fabulous eight years of growing it, but the aesthetic and the direction of art have changed so much. The history of poster art absolutely fascinates me, going back to the 60's and seeing millions of certain posters being sold. 

We're just trying to do something different in a very competitive market so it's really exciting when we can sign up artists, such as Lucy Muss, who you don't see everywhere, but we've got them. As a female-led business, we really take pride in championing our community of independent artists so it's amazing when we see them so well received. 

What can we expect from East End Prints next?

Oh, we have so many exciting things planned for 2025. 

We're always looking forward with our range. We have an absolutely brilliant collection of, I would say, studio artists is the only way to describe them. Some of them have been in vogue and, yeah I've got so many secrets up my sleeves to announce for this next year. We're really, really excited.