Who decided that the things that get us from one place to another have to look so serious?

When Sioux and I started working out how These Good Days should look, we kept coming back to the same thought. We make things for going somewhere, and most of that going somewhere is pretty ordinary. The commute, the gym, the weekend chores. We believe the ordinary is where our good days can actually live, so we’d rather notice the journey than just get through it.

There was a time when going somewhere felt like an event in itself. The Jet Age understood this. Travel was new and glamorous and a little bit thrilling. The journey wasn’t just the thing you endured to get to somewhere better. It was part of the experience.

We rather like that idea.

We’re not suggesting the 7.23 to Waterloo needs to become glamorous. But we do think there’s something worth reclaiming in enjoying the bit between leaving and arriving. And because we’re usually carrying something along the way, the things we carry are part of that experience too.

Which is where we think things have become a little dull. At some point, someone decided that the things we carry should be serious, sensible, and look like they belong in a filing cabinet.

We disagree.

And while we were working out what disagreeing looked like in fabric and colour, we discovered that a woman had fought this fight before us, back in the mid-1960s, with extraordinary nerve and glorious disregard for convention.

Here’s the thing about 1965, at the height of the Jet Age. People dressed up to fly. The going was part of the event. But look at the world of airline design at the time and you’d never have known it. The planes were silver, sensible and almost indistinguishable from one another. The most exciting thing an ordinary person could do with an afternoon had been dressed up like admin.

Braniff, a mid-sized American airline that wanted to matter, had handed the problem to an advertising executive named Mary Wells. She diagnosed the silver fleet in one word: staid. Her answer was not to make Braniff a little more modern, or a little more stylish. She went all in on total, unapologetic colour, and brought in Alexander Girard, a designer who believed design should produce joy, and fashion designer Emilio Pucci to make it happen. Then Braniff did the thing companies rarely do. They let them loose on everything.

Girard repainted the fleet in seven bold solid colours, so the tarmac looked like a packet of sweets. Pucci put the crews in couture. The artist Alexander Calder was eventually handed an entire jet to paint by hand. And underneath the showpieces, Girard redesigned more than seventeen thousand items. Ticket stubs. Playing cards. Soap wrappers. Blankets. Timetables. Baggage tags. Every last thing either met the standard or didn’t ship.

They called the campaign The End of the Plain Plane, and made passengers a promise. Fly with us seven times, and you’ll never fly the same colour twice.

Girard described the brief in three words: destroy the monotony.

We liked that almost as much as The End of the Plain Plane. And it gave us our own phrase. Girard set out to destroy the monotony in 1965. In 2026, we’ve decided it’s time to banish it again.

So when you see Banish the Monotony around here, that’s where it comes from. A design brief from 1965, picked up sixty years later and applied to a rather different sort of journey.

We don’t think ordinary things need to feel ordinary.

The campaign worked so well that Wells went on to found her own agency and become the first woman to run a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. History mostly files this story under Girard’s name. We think the woman who saw the opportunity, had the vision to imagine something radically different and then assembled the people to make it happen deserves her billing. As two women building a brand on the same diagnosis, we would say that, but we’d also be right.

Sixty years on, the Jet Age has faded, and the world has become very good at making practical things look practical and interchangeable. Just take a look at the bags next time you’re going through Euston or Heathrow. It’s a design language we recognise well. And it’s exactly the one we’re trying to get away from.

Next week, what we’re doing about it.

Sera

These are the good days. In our own seven colours.