Article du FT sur Asos (boutique UK)

qu'Asos signifie "As Seen On Screen"? ;)

Fast fashion for fast consumers
When internet clothing company As Seen On Screen listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market in 2001, it was known for its “red carpet replicas”, selling copies of dresses worn by actresses. Fashionistas looked down on the start-up and many celebrities were uncomfortable with the idea. Ten years later, Asos has remodelled itself into a global fashion destination where celebrities are happy to shop themselves.
The business, founded by Nick Robertson with a £2m loan from his brother, was originally conceived as a spin-off from Mr Robertson’s TV product placement business. But the business took off quickly and is now among the UK’s biggest fashion retailers, generating 11m unique users a month. “On a daily basis, that’s around 700,000 people,” he says. “Imagine having a shop with that many people walking through the door every day.”
Critics have consistently tried – and failed – to turn the company’s growth story into something resembling the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Online fashion would never take off, they said, underestimating the net-savvy generation who make up Asos’s 16 to 34-year-old core customer base.
Now the company is switching its focus to international sales. In 2007, non-UK sales made up 10 per cent of the company’s annual retail sales. Today, it is 44 per cent, and Mr Robertson expects it to surpass 50 per cent within the next six months.
Bounding around Asos’s headquarters in Camden, north London, one gets a sense of the scale of the company’s operation. Everything that appears on the website is done in-house, including photo shoots – the company photographs 2,000 items a week – and catwalk videos. Spread over four floors, the 700 staff based here call it “the fashion factory” and the open-plan floors are stuffed with shoot rails of clothes ready to be modelled and accessories. “It’s like a teenager’s bedroom times 100,” jokes Mr Robertson.
Keeping the fashion and technology arms of the company under one roof – the company employs 16 designers, whose products for Asos’s own label account for half of all sales, and 120 people in IT – enables both sides of the business to learn from each other. “We are a fashion and technology business,” he says.
Unusually for an office, the only phone that rings is Mr Robertson’s BlackBerry. All the other employees stare at their screens and are busy blogging, tweeting or on Facebook. While many companies would discourage the use of social media at the office, Mr Robertson says this is exactly what his staff should be doing. “They’re doing what they would be doing anyway – but they’re doing it for Asos,” he says.
This is no coincidence. Most of Asos’s staff fit the demographic of the company’s customer base: young, trendy and predominantly female. Understanding exactly who its customers are is perhaps Asos’s greatest strength.
Since its launch, everything Asos does has been aimed at “the imagined 22-year-old”, the median age of its shoppers. This is divided into three target groups: Fashion Forward – those who set the trends; Fashion Passengers – those who follow them; and Functional Fashion – the less trend-conscious.
Mr Robertson believes employing the same types of people that Asos sells to means the company knows how to reach them. “Nobody has done this before. If I had a board of seasoned retailers, they might have made decisions that were right for the retail market 10 years ago,” he says.
One result is a stealth marketing strategy built on social networking sites. Teenagers think they have “discovered” Asos through blogs and tweets instead of feeling like they have swallowed a sales pitch.
The company has also created its own sites that build on existing platforms, often before its competitors. In 2009, the company launched Asos Life, an “online community” that is a blend of staff and shoppers who blog, chat and post on fashion forums.
Last November, the company launched Asos Marketplace, which allows designers to set up boutique stores on its site selling their own creations and one-off vintage items. “Like a concession in a department store, they are renting web space from us,” he says. Asos vets its traders and takes a 10-15 per cent cut of everything they sell.
Two weeks ago, it started the Asos Facebook store, one of the first retailers to launch a shop on the social networking site. Signing up automatically gives Asos the right to send you e-mails, post on your wall and view your friend lists, photographs and profile information.
Much of Asos’s success has, however, been built on a low-tech guarantee to customers: free returns. In the early days of internet shopping, allowing customers to send anything they did not want back was essential.
As the company shifts its focus to the global 22-year-old, it is now offering free shipping. Mr Robertson calls this “the best marketing money can buy” and, in the US, France and Germany, returns are also free.
Not everyone is convinced that this model is sustainable. “Offering free delivery is an expensive way of getting new customers but it shows how high Asos’s margins are that they can afford to do that,” notes Nick Bubb, retail analyst at Arden Partners.
Another tap on finances is the company’s growing number of product lines, which have to be stored somewhere. “They have to be a perfect 10, operationally, to achieve these ambitious growth targets,” notes a rival retailer. “There is no margin for error. If we achieved 30 per cent sales growth, that would be fantastic from our point of view. But if Asos doesn’t achieve 50 per cent, the City will lose faith in the growth story.”
At the same time, rivals are improving their own offerings. At the luxury end of the sector, this includes Net-a-Porter and My-wardrobe.com, while there is a plethora of midmarket competitors including NotOnTheHighStreet.com. Moreover, fashion brands themselves are improving their online sales outlets.
Superdry, for example, makes more money through sales via its own website and has barred Asos from selling its goods in certain countries. “It’s the most profitable part of our whole business,” says Julian Dunkerton, chief executive of Supergroup, Superdry’s parent company. “If shoppers go on to Asos and find Superdry, I’m happy. But if they tap in Superdry to a search engine and it comes up with another website, that’s wrong.”
Always prepared to confound his critics, Mr Robertson is about to launch Fashion Finder, a service that will publicise brands that Asos does not sell. A nod to US fashion aggregator sites Polyvore and ShopStyle, the idea is to turn Asos into a “fashion destination” rather than just a store. “If you work at a fashion magazine, your role in life is to guide the reader through the world of fashion and edit it for them,” he says. “Why can’t shops do that?”
A year ago, Mr Robertson said he wanted Asos to achieve £1bn in sales, spread across five markets in five years. Four of the five target countries are the US, France, the UK and Germany – but the fifth has never been made public. Is it China? “A big strategic market,” is the most he offers. Notably, other Asos presentations have mentioned that the US and China account for 50 per cent of global internet traffic, whereas the UK represents only 3 per cent.
If Asos can crack Asia, the story will enter a new dimension. So far, Mr Robertson has been able to do exactly what everyone said he could not. That management style does not seem to be going out of fashion.