Asos launched in 2000 with the name As Seen on Screen, selling a plethora of goods and fashion sported by celebrities in films and on TV.
Founded in London by Nick Robertson, the great-grandson of the eponymous founder of the suit retailer Austin Reed, and Quentin Griffiths, its first products ranged from a pestle and mortar used by Jamie Oliver to a wallet that appeared in Pulp Fiction. The focus on clothing, which helped to turn it into a global powerhouse selling fashion to more than 18m customers in 238 countries and territories, did not come until several years later.
The company adopted the snappier Asos acronym in 2002 and began pushing fashion for twenty-somethings a couple of years later. It launched its first own-label womenswear in 2004, the year the company made its maiden profit of £120,000. Its creations were a big success, worn by singer Rihanna and by Michelle Obama, who sported a chequered red-and-white Asos dress on the campaign trail with her husband in 2012.
The fast-growing company was dealt a blow the same year when its Buncefield warehouse was hit by an explosion at a nearby oil depot. Stock worth £5.5m was destroyed weeks before the Christmas sales rush.
Asos rose from the ashes to expand abroad and into beauty and own-label menswear, riding the boom in online fashion as shares in the business, which floated in 2001, rose to about £70 each in 2014.
Disaster struck again in June 2014, when the company was forced to suspend its website after a fire at its main warehouse in Barnsley. The incident came only weeks after it issued a shock warning that wiped almost a third off the company’s stockmarket value.
Robertson announced his departure the following year, after Asos warned that higher warehouse costs and losses from a Chinese venture would hit annual profits.
Innovation including the use of social networking sites such as Instagram to interact with shoppers, picture-led search and own-label beauty ranges drove Asos on. It has also benefited from the fall in the value of the pound, which made its products cheaper overseas. It surged ahead of Marks & Spencer in value this year, hitting a new peak of just over £77 per share in March, which left the company valued at £6.4bn.
On Monday, however, its shares tanked on shock that the poster child for the fast-growing online fashion industry has been hit by the same unseasonable weather and Brexit uncertainty that has affected high-street rivals. Asos is still taking market share in the UK, but has had to discount heavily to do so, hitting profits. By the close, Asos was worth less than £2.2bn, just over a third of its peak value.
