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June 2000

ASOS changes the online shopping game

Kate Moss is photographed exiting a hotel in a beautiful black leather jacket in the year 2000. She looks amazing, but the jacket she’s wearing is the star of the show. Where can you buy it, and more importantly, where you can buy an affordable alternative that looks just as great? And that cute top that Jennifer Aniston is wearing in the latest episode of Friends, season seven. I want it, but I have no idea where to find it and neither do the other 10,000 women who saw the show and also fell in love with it. So sparks the ingenious idea, by Nick Robertson, to create a portal for items As-Seen-On-Screen, and ASOS is launched for every fashion-conscious person in the land. Here you could find and buy fashion alternatives to dress like your favourite star. A commercial idea for a celebrity-adoring population. It was one of the savviest ideas in the history of fashion.

Kate Moss (Steve Azzara/Corbis via Getty Images)

No other retailer had capitalised on the celebrity-outfit-dupes concept and culture in such an easy and affordable way. And by doing so, ASOS built up a loyal audience who would stick with them when they adapted their strategy to a dynamic fashion retail space.

That was in the year 2000. Sixteen years later, after a number of changes to their strategy, ASOS made £1,403.7 million in retail sales. In 2017, they were the biggest online-only (pure-play) retailer by sales in the world. ASOS were pioneers in an open marketplace, driving new ideas and pushing the boundaries when it came to customer service and shopping experiences. They were forward thinking with their delivery and returns processes (they’re the only fashion retailer to offer a year’s unlimited next-day delivery for £9.95 regardless of how much you spend), inspirational with their editorial, blog and social content and ingenious with their product-display techniques. I remember when I first stumbled onto ASOS back at university and ten years later, I’m still just as obsessed. I used to have asos.com as my browser’s homepage, just so that I could check the ‘new in’ section every single day before I even went to Google. The concierge in my building knew me personally because I would check for new parcels every day, and my flatmates almost had to hold an intervention. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but I was definitely mocked repeatedly for how many times a week I would place an order.

Nick Robertson (Andisheh Eslamboli/REX/Shutterstock)

(REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett)

Free deliveries and returns, catwalks for every product, style advice, sizing help and one of the biggest catalogues of products on the Internet. There are 4,000 new styles per week! But unlike many online retailers who stock alternative brands, ASOS stocks 44 per cent of its own product too, with 66 per cent of styles being unique to the company. They sell 850 brands and have warehouses in the UK, US and Europe, meaning they can ship to you wherever you are in the world – and that’s within a matter of days.

Not charging for returns or delivery was fundamental to the increase in customer acceptance. More people started to use and trust ASOS and this led to more trust in online shopping, encouraging more shoppers to become online purchasers. So the online selling space has a lot to thank ASOS for. It has thrived in its wake and the fashion retail space has never been the same since its launch. Thus, ASOS is definitely one of the biggest retail game-changers of the 21st century.

Reasons I love to shop online

1. Free returns – buy both sizes just in case and send back the one that doesn’t fit.

2. You never need to leave your house – pyjamas and a coffee in bed, scrolling through a website, is far more relaxing for me than pushing my way through Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon.

3. Everything is under one roof – if you physically shopped through the rails of every store you can find on ASOS, Net-A-Porter or even Selfridges online, it would take you hours to walk from door to door and shop to shop. Don’t get me wrong, I do love to physically shop too, when I’m in the mood, but I’m a converted online shopper through and through.

4. Style advice and ideas – that shirt that you love in the store, it doesn’t come with any style advice unless you saw it on a mannequin. Online, the retailer’s stylist and merchandisers will have styled it up for you, and hopefully provided links to every other product you can see the model wearing.