2 To what extent does ASOS sell through an integrated distribution channel system?ASOS is the UK’s most successful online-only fashion retailer. The company has experienced phenomenal growth based on showing young shoppers how to emulate the designer looks of celebrity magazine favourites such as Kate Moss, Alexa Chung and Sienna Miller at a fraction of the cost.

ASOS was founded in 2000. In 1996 Nick Robertson set up a business called Entertainment Marketing to place products in films and television programmes. By 2000 he was running a website called AsSeenOnScreen showing and selling brands that were used in films and on TV from a pair of Oakley sunglasses worn by Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible to a pestle and mortar used by Jamie Oliver the TV chef. But it was fashion that proved the biggest success and Robertson decided to focus on that. ASOS was born.

The ASOS website The ASOS website is a major factor in its success. Visitors can click on their favourite celebrity or pop star and view clothes they have been seen in. Perhaps a shopper prefers the style of Kate Moss. The cheapest way is not to visit ASOS’s bricks-and-mortar competitor Topshop but to choose a £6 ASOS Lurex vest ‘in the style of’ the London supermodel. At any one time on the website there are over 400 styles of dresses plus mountains of tops, trousers, shoes, bags, lingerie, swimwear and jewellery and an entire men’s section, all of which is modelled by people walking on a catwalk. At the ASOS headquarters in North London, there are four studios where a pool of 30 models attempt to bring the clothes to life and transmit the excitement of the catwalk to the consumer.