More than just an online fashion for 20-somethings, ASOS has pioneered social shopping. Currently one of the most successful online fashion retailers founded in the UK, ASOS offers tens of thousands of branded and own-label fashion items to millions of 20-something men and women around the globe. But when the company was first established in the year 2000 the outlook for online businesses selling clothing was bleak. Boo .com – the online retailer heralded to change the way we shop – was on the verge of collapse, the dot-com bubble was about to burst and to make matters worse, the word on the digital high street was that no one is going to buy fashion items online anyway. 

Nick Robertson and Quinten Griffiths, founders of As Seen On Screen (ASOS), were obviously not deterred by this gloomy outlook. Inspired by watching American TV series Friends, Nick and Quinten set about building a website which could sell items that potential customers had seen on television. Initially, ASOS sold copies of clothing worn by celebrities but soon the company began developing its own brand. This focus enabled the company to start to build a reputation that was attractive to young fashion shoppers. 

In the past, it has been suggested that it is not possible to develop a successful online fashion business but by 2004 ASOS had introduced its own-label women’s wear and in 2006 it was the first company in the UK to launch online catwalk shows. By 2010 ASOS began expanding into European markets and currently the company has offices in Sydney, New York, France, Germany and Russia. 

By 2011, ASOS had grown into the UK’s largest online fashion retailer and the ASOS Annual Report for 2011 proclaimed that ‘Asos was the third most visited fashion website on the planet’, averaging 13 million unique visitors a month with 5.3 million registered users and 3.2 million active customers (defined as having shopped in the last 12 months). The main site (www.asos.com) targets the original UK market, but the company has grown: its share in other markets including France (www.asos.fr), Germany (www.asos.de) and the USA (www.us.asos.com). It has increased its country delivery list to 196. 

The company’s competitive strategy aimed at developing a unique market position by selling a specialist range of products which have ‘the designer fashion look’. Nick Robertson, the company’s founder, started selling branded clothing as seen in films and on television. Not only did this enable the company the opportunity to create a market but it also benefited from celebrity endorsements in PR and promotional campaigns. ASOS now sells over 50,000 branded and own-label clothing products and offers a much wider product range than its high street competitors. ASOS operates as a fast fashion retailer, which has meant overcoming many challenges to get goods to the customers on time and at the same time manage the high rate of returns. ASOS has set up systems which enable product lines to be replaced quickly. Operating at this level creates many challenges for ASOS, so, in order to deliver the promise of fast designer-look fashion, and to constantly update product ranges, ASOS has established an ‘in-house’ design team in Europe, which creates catwalk lookalike items that are produced close to the customers, which aids delivery, and helps the higher returns rate of operating online rather than in-store. 

Questions 

1 Describe how ASOS applies the marketing mix online? 

2 Summarise the integrated communications strategy used by ASOS? 

3 What risks do you anticipate as ASOS expands overseas?