Dedicated follower of e-fashion

What downturn? The upstart online fashion retailer Asos is raking it in as celebrity-mad customers snap up clothes as worn by Sienna, Kate, Posh and Agyness, says Jane Lewis

Last winter I was button-holed in a North London pub by a former City type who, judging by the colour of his nose (mauve) and the company he was keeping (heavily be-studded), had clearly fallen on hard times some time before the present trouble began. He had many stories to tell – including the obligatory one about the magic stock he’d spotted early but had failed to back. It was the name that had put him off: AsSeenOnScreen. He thought it had a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ quality.

Whether or not the anecdote was true, it says something about Asos.com (as the company is now known) that, in a few short years, its legend has grown to become the stuff of saloon-bar sob stories. Certainly anyone betting on the stock four years ago would have made a killing. Back then, shares of this upstart e-tailer, which makes a virtue of offering celebrity fashion at knockdown prices, were changing hands for 5p. By early August, they were nudging 350p as it announced a 95 per cent rise in first-quarter sales to June and revealed that it had enjoyed its first day of takings in excess of £1 million. ‘We are growing like stink,’ says founder Nick Robertson, 40, who retains a tidy 12-13 per cent stake in the business. And analysts seem agreed that Sienna, Kate, Posh, Agyness et al have lost none of their come-hither charms for the ‘Heat generation’ – downturn or no. Indeed, were you to listen to some commentators on the subject of Asos’s apparently unstoppable rise, you might think this ‘Amazon of Internet fashion’ was the only thing – barring Aldi and Lidl – standing between the British retail scene and certain disaster.

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