Digital department store Very.co.uk is boosting its branded fashion offer with the launch of high street names such as Miss Selfridge, which made its debut on the site this week.
The young fashion label is one of a tranche of brands to join Very‘s roster, including Warehouse and Coast, which will go live in the next month. This follows the recent introduction of River Island and Wallis to the website. Miss Selfridge launched with a carefully selected collection on Very, which is already proving incredibly popular with shoppers.
Very, the flagship website at the UK‘s fourth largest etailer Shop Direct, already stocks over 900 labels across its department store range. The retailer is enhancing its fashion offer to put in front of its customers all the brands they would shop on the high street.
The recent swathe of clothing brands launching on Very, follows the appointment of former Gap Buying Director Zoe Matthews as Shop Direct fashion director last July.
Matthews said: “We want to give our customers more of the brands they want. Our aim is to bring all the labels they‘d seek on the high street to our slick, easy-to-navigate website to create a one-stop shop for fashion.”
Miss Selfridge is fun, girly and bang on trend – a perfect fit for our younger, fashion-conscious customers. We thought it‘d go down a storm, and it might be early days but it looks like our hunch was right.”
We‘re confident that Warehouse and Coast will also be big hits and will give our customers more reason than ever before to visit Very.co.uk.”
The move comes after online fashion pureplay Boohoo revealed last week that it will conduct a pilot to sell 100 items of its clothing on Asos from next month. The fashion etailer, which sells own-brand clothing on its site, is aiming to push brand awareness in both its domestic and international markets through a presence on Asos and this will be the first time Boohoo sells clothes outside its own website.
“Boohoo is delighted to announce it will be presenting its brand on the Asos platform, introducing an additional and well-established channel to market,” said a Boohoo spokesperson. “Boohoo has over 12,000 styles online at any one time, but the offering available through Asos will be made up of a capsule collection of around 100 items.”
“Boohoo is a single brand, so we wouldn‘t deem that as a direct competitor because we have 750 single brands on our website as well as our own brands,” Asos Boss Nick Robertson commented after Asos revealed its financial results on the same day.
“Boohoo, because of the price points they sell at, appeal to almost a younger customer than Asos,” he continued. “We‘re 20s, they‘re almost teenager and very early 20s.”
The CEO added that he doesn‘t see Amazon as a fashion competitor, but as a “platform for potentially selling lots of clothes”.
