If you're not a 13 to 34-year-old female, don't know anyone who falls into
that category and never scan the stockists on fashion pages, it's possible
that you are in a prelapsarian state of ignorance regarding asos.com,
the website that more or less brings the high street to your computer. Once
acquainted with it, your bank balance might wish that you'd left the high
street where it belongs. With its 600 brands, constant refrain of “new! new!
new!” (around 500 items go on site each week) and slick visuals, Asos is
horribly, most distractingly, addictive. Clothes aren't just plonked on
plastic mannequins, they are, to use Asos jargon, “catwalked” - ie,
photographed on real models who twirl around to infectious music.
Want a dress almost exactly the same as Cheryl Cole's? Wonder how Jessica Biel
achieved her recent red-carpet hair? Er, as a responsible adult, actually,
no. But the tone of the website, with its boundless enthusiasm for trends,
is contagious, so you click, and bingo! Asos is the closest a fashion
website has come to capturing the visceral excitement of the high street
without the downsides. Which is how, presumably, it came to buck the gloom
enveloping the retail sector. Sales for the past nine weeks aren't just an
optimistic shimmer, they're sparkling, up 118 per cent on the same period
last year.
If this were the Today programme, there would be a pause while a presenter
explained that this was a blip and that any moment the entire retail
community was going to set fire to itself in one last attempt to create heat
at the cash register. But as this isn't Today, let us instead consider why
Asos is flourishing. It is partly because so far, unless they are looking
for jobs, teenagers and twentysomethings are relatively immune to
recessionary deprivations. Those feeling the pinch would rather live on
baked beans than skip a trend. But Asos also does a brilliant job of
capturing the dizzy, breathless must-have excitement that you get when you
step into Oxford Street's flagship chains - except that where each of those
might stock 70 different dresses at a time, Asos offers 2,000.
Amazingly, it has little competition on the web. Chains such as H&M are
too busy looking to open in China or battening down the hatches to expand
their online offerings. “But unless you live in Central London, near the
high street flagship stores, you don't have access to most of what you see
in magazines,” says Nick Robertson. Now, even if you're an Asos devotee, you
may not have a clue who Nick Robertson is. Which is probably as he likes it.
An affable, slightly portly (my words: he calls himself “the fattest cox
ever to helm at Henley”) 41-year-old, he is a compelling combination of
self-effacing modesty and raging optimism. This must come in handy if you
didn't exactly cover yourself in glory at public school (two Ds and an F at
A level). He went on to work in advertising (not even at the creative end;
he was a media planner). Robertson set up asos.com in 2000. Then it was
called As Seen On Screen and the idea was to build it into a mecca for
anything glimpsed on film and TV, be it a pair of Oakley sunglasses worn by
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible or a pestle and mortar used by Jamie
Oliver. It became rapidly apparent that fashion would be the engine -
although, it must be said, Robertson doesn't obviously do fashion, despite
his grandfather being Austin Reed. The day that we meet he's wearing a
checked Gant shirt, dark-blue jeans and looks just how you'd expect a former
cox at Henley to look.
“What I bring to the picture is customer service,” he says. Too true. As the
mother of two Asos groupies, I can attest only too well to the speed of
delivery and zappiness of the website, which is far slicker than some of the
more upmarket ones. But he also brings vision, not that he'd ever use the
word; he seems to prefer empiricism. “The high street's grown up over
hundreds of years. People congregate there naturally. You don't get that
social interaction on the internet. You might go to six or seven shops, but
on the web you'll visit three sites, tops. So we have to create a different
hook.”
Inordinate care is taken to show the way that clothes move; at the Asos
headquarters in Mornington Crescent, North London, there are four studios in
which a pool of 30 models, plus in-house stylists and make-up artists, spend
their days attempting to transmit the excitement of the catwalk to the
consumer, even if that consumer is buying something that costs less than
£20. No wonder Asos is about to post a turnover of £165 million. “To put
that in context,” says a typically low-key Robertson, “that's equal to just
the one branch of Primark on Oxford Street.” He's not being falsely modest,
he insists. “To me, that just shows how much more potential there is. It's
the same with awareness of our brand - it's 44 per cent among the target
market [despite Robertson coming from an advertising background, Asos
doesn't use the medium], which gives you an idea of how much more we can
achieve.”
The fashion magic comes from the small team of designers and from Caren
Downie, who joined last July from Topshop and heads the 20-strong team of
buyers. With an average age of 26, the Asos staff are the Asos customer, and
judging by the way that they're dressed when I visit, they're regulars on
the site.
“There was never a moment when we decided to become a fashion site,” says
Robertson. “It just gradually morphed into one. Our whole evolution's been
like that. We took off as broadband took off.” They changed the name from
the more lumbersome As Seen On Screen [he bought the Asos acronym from a
Turkish businessman for £500] not because the celebrity angle became less
important, but because he couldn't envisage such a long name over the door
of a shop.
Not that he plans to open one; he's too busy expanding his virtual site.
Turnover has doubled each year since its launch, apart from 2005, when its
Hemel Hempstead warehouse burnt down. “That was a bit of a downer,” he
admits. Maternity, childrenswear, vintage and a growing array of designer
labels - Pringle 1815, Jaeger London and the ck Calvin Klein diffusion line
- aimed at older, higher-spending customers, are on the slate for 2009. Lack
of online competition means that brands initially suspicious of selling
through Asos (“Rightly so, we were unknown and the internet was completely
unsexy,” he says congenially) are queueing up. Not that it's made Robertson
complacent. “Might we give netaporter.com a run for its money? Absolutely.
My dream is that we won't just have the high street on asos.com: we'll have
Bond Street, Brick Lane and thrift shops.”
