Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Too Fast?
ASOS stocks 85,000 styles on its site. Boohoo turns
around collections in two weeks flat. And competitors are
freaking out.
By Chavie Lieber May 16, 2017, 10:00am EDT
Photography by Ophelia Wynne
SHARE
Down one quaint street just off the center’s main drag is a red
building that serves as the headquarters for British fast fashion
brand Boohoo, a company founded 11 years ago by partners
Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane.
The company now employs 518 people in its head office, and 884
more in its warehouse in nearby Burnley. It boasts 5.2 million active
customers and ships to more than 100 countries. It features a
whopping 20,000 styles on its site at any given time, with prices that
start as low as $15 and don’t go much higher than $130.
“We want the Boohoo look to be fun, young, energetic,” says Kat
Butterworth, Boohoo’s studio manager. “Commercial but accessible.
Our models need to look like girls our customers aspire to. They
should look like her best friend, but not the type that would steal her
boyfriend.”
Cindy steps onto the white seamless and strikes a few poses. A
photographer in chunky Doc Martens and ripped jeans crouches for
the shots, and a stylist fans a piece of cardboard so the model’s hair
blows softly for the camera.
“Our models need to look like girls our customers aspire to. They
should look like her best friend, but not the type that would steal her
boyfriend.”
Zara is based in Spain, H&M in Sweden, and Uniqlo in Japan, but it’s
the United Kingdom that’s emerged as the dominant country for the
next generation of fast fashion companies, online-first ones with
unprecedented speed like Boohoo, ASOS, and Missguided. Topshop,
New Look, River Island, and Matalan — which all have physical
locations, but also robust digital presences where they sell trend-
driven merchandise produced faster than their non-UK peers — are
also based in the country.
“Celebrities are such a huge part of what is influential here, and the
tabloid press is popular too. They hound celebrities, and the royals,”
says Arthur. “In the early 2000s, weekly magazines were absolutely
massive. There were loads of them — Heat, Grazia, Look — that
were all geared to fashion and they were a huge part of our lives.
Anything that looked like whatever was on the cover of Grazia would
sell out immediately. We’d be shopping in armloads.”
“The US has 40 times the landmass of the UK, so while there’s loads
of space to build new malls, it’s very densely populated here and so
most shopping was built very close to where people live,” says
British retail analyst Richard Hyman. “High Street today can be
interchangeable with retail in general, and it’s the most important
shopping location.”
Early High Streets were filled with small mom-and-pop shops and
pharmacies. Today England’s big department stores, like
Debenhams and Marks & Spencer, and fast fashion brands, both
British and not, dominate.
“The High Street was where we spent all of our time because it was
so accessible,” says Arthur. “I imagine it’s not different from
American consumers going to the mall, but it’s such a big part of
growing up in the UK. I feel as though it’s completely ingrained in us
since birth. As a teenager, I worked in a coffee shop with my three
closest friends and when we’d earn our money, we’d dash next door
to New Look to buy a new top.”
It’s also worth noting that much of the United Kingdom’s spending
happens online, and so it makes sense that large-scale online-only
businesses have taken hold there. According to the British Retail
Consortium, 24 percent of clothing and footwear purchases in the
UK are e-commerce purchases. This puts the UK well ahead of most
of Western Europe, and certainly the US, where only 17 percent of
clothing and shoes are bought online. Online innovation has paid off
for UK retailers, many of which began incorporating “click and
collect” before their American peers, which is one reason UK
retailers aren’t seeing the type of carnage we’re experiencing in the
US.
“We can know within one day, sometimes within a few hours,
whether something is going to work, and if it does, we can get a new
line of it ASAP.”
“Our business model is that she lets us know,” echoes Seeley, “she”
being the Boohoo customer. “If she buys into it, we’ll give her more.
If she doesn’t, we’ll drop it. Trying all these trends allows us to
evolve throughout the season, rather than just setting things up at
the beginning and not having a way out if she doesn’t like it.”
“Fast fashion companies can have a very short lifespan,” says Ben
Voyer, a professor at the London School of Economics. “It’s a spot in
the market that’s growing very fast, but can shrink too. The teenage
girls shopping at Boohoo aren’t going to shop there forever. These
customers tend to have very low loyalty, so while they shop and
shop, once they find something else, it’s over.”
Inditex now has 7,292 stores around the world. Zara, its biggest
brand, has 2,213 locations; its shoppers in London are said to visit
its stores 17 times a year, in contrast to the average store visit rate
of four times a year. H&M adopted Zara’s tactics along the way,
eclipsing Zara with 4,000 of its own locations to become the world’s
largest fast fashion brand. While the Swedish giant has been around
since 1947, it was only in the early ’80s that the company began to
rapidly accelerate its production and increase its store footprint.
These companies and their peers have turned the concept of
seasonal buys on its head; fast fashion stores turn over 15 times a
year, according to NPR.
The speed at which fast fashion operates, and the low prices it
promises, has had a profound effect on consumers, who see clothing
as a highly disposable good. As studies from Greenpeacehave found,
many customers now toss clothing after two or three wears. “Not
only is this a huge waste of all of the resources in these products,”
Greenpeace concludes, “but it creates yet more pollution, through
emissions of hazardous chemicals and greenhouse gases from
incinerator stacks or landfills.”
The cheap cost of the clothing is only possible because of the cheap
labor that makes it, with the majority of fast fashion factories
located in developing countries.
ASOS stands for “As Seen On Screen” and was founded in 2000 by
Quentin Griffiths and Nick Robertson, two friends who ran an
entertainment product placement company. As Robertson told
the Telegraph in 2005, the idea for ASOS came about when they
were thinking of ways to expand their existing business. He read in a
magazine that “a lamp appeared in Friends and NBC got 28,000
calls or something ridiculous about where the lamp came from.”
ASOS’s only investor at the time was Robertson’s brother, and with
the company short on cash, it decided to go public in October 2001.
This provided a much-needed infusion of capital, and business
picked up steam right away when it began selling brands like Reiss
and Karen Millen bought with the new funds. It also saw success
with the “as seen on screen” products it initially promised: the tiger
underwear Robbie Williams wore in his “Rock DJ” music video; a
copy of a sleeveless pink dress Sarah Jessica Parker wore in the Sex
and the City movie; floral dresses that looked like the ones Keira
Knightley wore around town. The website even had a function where
shoppers could search by celebrity and then buy their outfits.
Today, ASOS is the largest online fashion and beauty retailer in the
UK, offering 85,000 different products (including 4,000 new styles
every week) to 12.4 million active customers. Its own brand makes
up 44 percent of its business, while the rest comes by way of a
curated selection of 850other brands that include French
Connection, Converse, and J Brand, as well as many with little name
recognition.
ASOS is the largest online fashion and beauty retailer in the UK,
offering 85,000 different products to 12.4 million active customers.
“We are the largest fashion label without a store, and that is
because of the sheer volume of what we can offer,” says Nicola
Thompson, the company’s global trading director. “Shoppers come
to us because they know there will be a product offering unlike any
other. We have amazing combinations, and an unlimited amount of
popular brands, and that is really a unique positioning within the
market.”
“They carry so much that’s just a click away,” she says. “The
website is so easy to use that it’s easy to spend money. Me and all
of my friends will order something in several sizes and compare how
they feel, because it’s easy to just send it back. We also like to use
the products to play with what we have in our wardrobe, which is
something you can’t do in stores. ASOS just fits our lifestyle better
than shopping on the High Street.”
Mooney says that by 2020, ASOS intends for its American business
to be as big as its British one. ASOS is also planning to open a
distribution center in the US; it currently has a warehouse in Ohio,
but only some 20 percent of its American orders are fulfilled there,
with the rest coming from the UK. Once that’s set up, it will offer the
free next-day shipping its customers in Europe enjoy.
“To companies out here, the US is the top of the top. If you can
crack the US, you have the fashion market,” says Quentin Bradley,
Boohoo’s head of creative. “We actually think of the US as three
different markets: there’s the West Coast, the East Coast, and then
the whole middle. There’s a huge earning potential for any company
to head out there, and a lot of companies have tried to make it and
stumbled. It’s important for global relevance.”
Is there room for everyone? At the very least, Americans’ desire for
cheap and trendy clothing is not likely to slow down anytime soon.
“Of course it makes sense these brands are coming to the US,” says
Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of
Cheap Fashion. “We aren’t just a consumer-driven country, we are
also low-end shoppers. High fashion has never become mainstream
here.”
Editor: Julia Rubin
Copy editor: Emma Alpern
https://www.racked.com/2017/5/16/15643246/asos-boohoo-british-fast-fashion