Girlguiding (apparently accidentally) soft-launched its new branding today – the official launch, hopefully with some fanfare, is coming tomorrow. Let’s talk about it!
First, there is no new uniform coming! Well, there is, but it’s not until 2026. Girlguiding won’t start thinking about designing it until late 2025, then they’ll have supply and demand issues, so even brand new girls buying a brand new uniform won’t routinely be wearing it until 2027, probably. Next, there’s an official two-year changeover period when you can continue wearing the old one. Third, no leader worth their salt is going to demand that you replace a perfectly wearable uniform with a brand new one just because those two years are up. Whatever section you or your young member is in right now, they’ll have moved up to the next before the new uniform comes into existence. Older girls who’ve only got another year or so before they move on won’t get new uniforms – they never do. I mean, they can, but parents never think it’s worth it and they’re right. Current uniforms will continue to be passed to younger sisters, cousins, friends and neighbours. There’s plenty to talk about today but uniform is a discussion for 2026 so don’t worry about it for another couple of years.
Second, we have three major changes. 1, the Girlguiding colours 2, the trefoil 3, Rangers.
Girlguiding seems to think their branding has been a bit inconsistent over the last 30-odd years – basically, ever since we graduated from the smart little dresses and tried to join the modern age. The result is that the general public don’t really recognise and understand us and they don’t recognise or understand that the sections are all part of the whole. This is supposed to address that. In order to succeed, we really need to stick with this new branding for a long time – it takes time for things to permeate the general public consciousness and if you change it even every ten years, people don’t learn to recognise it.
Girlguiding has disposed of the 2010s mid-blue and pink! Yay! They’ve also got rid of those ugly wonky boxes that were impossible for anyone else to reproduce for official use anyway. We’ve gone back to our traditional navy blue and our accent is now a mid-blue that’s a bit brighter than the previous one but not obnoxious. Where once we had a shameful attempt at “we’re modern, us!”, we’ve now got a fairly serious and sober navy, blue and white colour scheme. Yeah, it does look a bit Scout-y. That’s not a bad thing. Scouts have a positive public image, by and large. Girlguiding doesn’t. We’re either the 1950s housewives, with our sewing and our “dob dob dob” or we’re corrupting the children by recognising that not all leaders – or kids – are cishet. So in the eyes of the public, this quite respectable hint-of-Scouts image might not be a bad thing. There are now lots of straight lines and the strapline “we help all girls know they can do anything”. I’m not a big fan of it but it is more dynamic than “the UK’s biggest charity for girls and young women” and it’s a lot better than the ELC-inspired “we discover, we grow”.
Next, the trefoil. I’ve lived through three versions of the trefoil since I was a Rainbow. It’s still noticeably the same shape. It makes corporate sense to incorporate the initials of the company in the logo, using two Gs facing each other as the two lower leaves of the trefoil. The guiding flame, the stem of the lead, has become a path, pointing forwards to the guiding star. Not a big fan of that but again, it makes sense. I don’t love it but it’s a lot better than what I was imagining.
And last, and possibly most importantly, the new sections. What Girlguiding wants to do is make the four sections recognisable as part of the same family. I thought they’d do that by making everything the same colour, probably navy, with a hint of a brand new colour for each section. The cuffs and collar of the uniform, probably – making all the uniforms almost identical but just different enough that you still have to buy a new one when you move up. There’s still plenty of time for them to decide to do that but like I said, let’s not worry about it. For now, all the sections have had their colours refreshed and their logos changed.
The logos aren’t a dramatic change. The font has gone uniform, an unfussy rounded sans-serif, which is kind of boring and corporate compared to the bouncy rounded Rainbow and Brownie logos of literally yesterday. Each section now has a symbol over the top. The Rainbow change is extremely subtle. Brownies have gone from a pink and blue flower to a magnifying glass and the shade of yellow is slightly richer and more golden than before. Going forward, the yellow is evidently going to dominant over the brown. Fair enough. Guides have lost that hint of red that they’ve had at least since the early 90s. Girlguiding want to make it fairly clear that they’re the original section, so they more or less share the official Girlguiding colours and their symbol is now the star from the trefoil. It’s a bit underwhelming. You need a complimentary colour to brighten it up a bit. On the other hand, their official shade of blue hasn’t changed dramatically.
But the Rangers… Back in about 2018, when The Senior Section was removed, Girlguiding surveyed the 14+ age group to choose the new name, the new colours and the new uniform style. That definitely happened – I received those surveys and I talked to my Rangers at the time about what they’d liked, disliked and voted for. The 14-18s voted overwhelmingly to keep the name Rangers for the new section and to keep the teal/turquoise colour scheme. Secondary colours went from grey, pink and orange to pretty much just grey and we got a new logo that said RANGERS rather than The Senior Section, with a tent for the A.
Five years on, they’ve thrown all that away. Rangers’ colours are now a mulberry purple with baby pink accents and a hint of red. I don’t hate it. It’s a huge change – teal to purple is about as different as it’s possible to get – but I don’t hate it. My current Rangers, who are still Guides until the end of term, have never really seen the current Ranger branding because we haven’t had Rangers in the division for a good few years, so their opinion won’t be coloured by what they think Rangers “should” look like. My experience of teenagers is that they tend to prefer purple to green. I like that we’re moving away from grey. Nothing says “we don’t care about this section” like putting them in grey uniforms, although I’ve already seen some leaders protesting the purple on the grounds that teenagers like the anonymity of grey when they’re out in public.
The other thing they’re saying is that it’s not fair on Rangers – they’re the smallest and least-known section and Girlguiding aren’t helping by constantly reinventing and rebranding them, which means people don’t have a chance to get to know them. There’s some truth and some merit to that – but I’m hopeful that this is the first time they are actively thinking of them. Half the idea of this rebranding is to show the four sections – yes, the four – as one continuous family with a consistent theme running through them. A consistent sub-brand of the main Girlguiding brand, just like the others. There was an argument that Rangers have always been themed with at least a shade of something blue-like, to show that they’re part of the Guide family, which is blue. Actually, I like that they’re not blue. For one thing, my Google calendar will only let me choose from two shades of blue so I can’t make Guides one blue, general Girlguiding things another blue and Rangers a third one. Second, Rainbows and Rainbows have been allowed their own identities with their own non-blue colours and they’ve done pretty well. If I wanted Rangers to change colour away from the teal-turquoise, I might have gone for more of a bottle green but then again, the Scouts have got bottle green pretty well covered and the last thing we want is to accidentally look like Scouts. So teal-turquoise made sense but purple also makes sense – and my calendar will appreciate it.
Plus, on the subject of being fair to Rangers, most of the new stuff with the new branding on is consistent across all four sections – four sets of scrunchies (not that they’ll wear them), four mugs, four teddies, matching birthday badges that recognise that Rangers have birthdays too, four sets of birthday cards, four wristbands. Young Leaders have their own Promise certificate – I haven’t personally had a YL since the new sections came in so that might not be new but I like to see it anyway. We’re so used to seeing Rainbows and Brownies with two or three double-page spreads of section-themed gifts in the trading catalogue and then Rangers having five grey things, so this is a good start to the new branding.
I’ll talk to my nearly-Rangers and get their opinion – it’s all very well discussing this as leaders and as people who don’t have any skin in the game, but surely the most important people here are the actual 14-18s who are part of this movement. Yeah, they haven’t been consulted and what they said five years ago has just been thrown away but I’ll save my ire for whether they think it’s worth it.
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