ASOS Captures Celebrity Clothing Market Online

A fashion business that specialises in selling "celebrity" style to twentysomething shoppers last week emerged as one of the biggest Christmas winners in the retail sector - and it doesn't run a single shop. Asos (formerly known as "AsSeenOnScreen" attracted almost a million customers to its website in December generating a 70% jump in sales to £8.9m. Founder and chief executive Nick Robertson said: "We had a cracking Christmas but we could probably have done more if we had a bigger warehouse."

Asos was forced to use overspill warehouses to cope with the Christmas rush, which accounts for 40% of annual profits. It hopes to move to a single, larger warehouse before June. Asos.com targets young shoppers who want to dress just like the celebs they see in magazines like Heat and Now. Its website heaves with descriptions of clothing "in the style" of young fashion icons such as Victoria Beckham, Jamelia, Cat Deeley, Sienna Miller, Rachel Stevens and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Trading figures for the Christmas season marked the end of an extremely successful 12 months, which saw the group's shares end the year as the best performer on the stock exchange - up from 5p to 78.5p. Mr Robertson's 14% stake has climbed in value from £490,000 to £7.7m. Asos claims to have 420,000 registered shoppers and according to Hitwise data, it is now the second most visited UK fashion website with 4.5% of the market. It is outranked only by the mighty Next, but beats many of its far bigger rivals, including Top Shop, Mothercare and Ann Summers.

Its shoppers are confident with the net - so confident that Robertson has ditched the call centre he used to operate to handle enquiries. Now all contact is by email. "We had to be bold," he says. "We are an internet business and I only really want shoppers used to buying on the web. If you start talking to them they cost more." He is in a fast-growing market. According to IMRG there are now 16 million internet shoppers in Britain. Clothing, after a stuttering start, is now the fastest growing category.

The Asos site's busiest times are not weekends, but lunchtimes and between 7pm and 9pm, with lulls when his customers stop to catch up on their TV soaps: "We can tell when Eastenders is on," Robertson says. The average shopper buys a couple of items at a time, spending about £37, nearly 25% more than they did a year ago. Broker Seymour Pierce has pencilled in profits of £1.55m for this year, rising to £2.3m in 2006.