Coming soon: 48 Colours
A metal tin. Freshly sharpened tips. 48 pencils, lined up by colour, each shade a step deeper than the last. That feeling of possibility before a single line is drawn: that's where this collection begins. Organised by colour, spanning from the lightest tint to the deepest tone, 48 Colours is the satisfaction of the full spectrum, waiting for whatever you have in mind.
Before you begin
Anyone who draws knows the moment just before the first line. Every tip is sharpened, the pencils are laid out by colour, and a large sheet of carefully chosen paper lies in front of you, still blank. Everything is ready, and anything is still possible. That image, every colour side by side, has a pull almost anyone will recognise. Susan designs functional, considered products, and colour is a great source of drive and inspiration in that work. 48 Colours is its most direct expression.
From our own archive
For this collection, we drew on many of the colours we have developed over the years. Those who have followed SUSAN BIJL for a while will recognise names from earlier collections: Sunflower, Raspberry, Greenscreen, Sailor Red, Oxyde. Working with existing fabrics allowed us to use up remaining stock and, at the same time, build a wider palette than ever before.
That has consequences. Some colours exist in very small numbers, and once they're gone, they're gone. Part of the fabric also dates from earlier years. Those bags are water-repellent, whereas all our products have been waterproof since 2025.
One colour, edge to edge
For the first time, an entire collection comes in solids. The flash, usually a contrasting stripe, takes the same colour as the bag itself. We have done this before on individual pieces, but never across a full collection. The result puts the colour itself at the centre.
The structure follows the pencil tin too. The Small, Medium and Large of The New Shopping Bag share a colour family, each in its own gradation: Sunflower, Fluo Yellow and TV Yellow, or Fluo Pink, Pale Pink and Sakura. A gradient runs through the collection as a whole, and through the sizes within each colour.
The collection
48 Colours consists mainly of The New Shopping Bag, the product where it all began 26 years ago, and Pouches. Alongside them are two Bum Bags, The New 24/7 Bag and Straps in Wide and Slim.
The images
For the campaign, we asked Scheltens & Abbenes to capture the collection in four images. We admire their ability to reduce a product idea to a single abstract, telling image. We worked with them before on our anniversary book and the ZERO collection. For 48 Colours, they stacked bags and pouches into columns of colour, ordered like pencils in a tin.
Jan Bijl, with styling by Lidewij Merckx, photographed models dressed in white. They are the canvas. The bags, like colour pencils, make the colour statement.
The logo was designed by 75B. The silver on the packaging refers to the silver imprint on colour pencils.
Available from 23 October
48 Colours is available from Friday 23 October, 10:00 CEST, online, in our two Rotterdam stores (Nieuwe Binnenweg and Avenue Concordia) and through our stockists worldwide.
