Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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July 02, 2008
Asos.com: growth and demographics
Internet clothing retailer Asos.com seems to have shrugged off the economic downturn by yesterday announcing that it had doubled sales over the last 3 months. Following our analysis of the rapidly growing UK online fashion market last week, this didn’t come as a huge surprise to us. We’ve been tracking Asos for a while: it regularly appears on the IMRG – Hitwise Hot Shops List, and is now the second most visited retailer in our Apparel and Accessories category (behind Next, but ahead of River Island, TopShop and New Look). As the chart below illustrates, traffic to Asos.com has doubled over the last 12 months.
Asos, which originally stood for As Seen On Screen, specialises in affordable versions of celebrity fashions – the gladiator sandals as worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the Sex and the City movie are a current favourite. However, while the site’s core customer base is younger women, one of the reasons for its success over the last year has been its ability to appeal to older customers. Looking at our demographic data for the site during June this year and last, you can see that there has been noticeable shift to older visitors. As the chart below illustrates, 18 – 34 olds are still the core audience but the proportion of visitors from the 35+ age group has increased from just under a third to just over a half between 2007 and 2008.
Looking at the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data, it’s interesting to note that this doesn’t necessarily equate to a move ‘upmarket’ so much as move into the mainstream. Asos’s clothes are relatively cheap, but a year ago the most over-represented Mosaic group visiting the site was Happy Families, an affluent group defined as ‘families with a focus on career and home, mostly younger age groups now raising children’. Looking at the most recent Mosaic data, the thing jumps out now is that no one individual Mosaic group is particularly over represented anymore. This implies that the site’s customer base now broadly represents the online population as a whole – i.e. the mainstream.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:30 AM
Posted to Demographics | Fashion | Mosaic lifestyle | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Women
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