Accommodating new global audiences ‘painful’ – says ASOS investment director Daniel Bobroff
Scaling up its business to accommodate a new global audience is “painful”, ASOS’ investment director Daniel Bobroff has admitted.
Speaking at the Decoded Fashion Summit in London, Bobroff revealed that scaling up the online retailer to meet the demands of a global audience is not an easy task and that ASOS is always keen to re-inforce its start-up mentality, to reflect this.
"It's certainly not easy, its one step at a time, it’s painful and we have to learn to adapt."
“We try to remain restlessly innovative. So we don’t take any of these opportunities, any of these markets, as a given formula. We try to get within the actual culture of the audience and the community we are serving and nowhere is that more obvious than our experiences in China, for example, where we had to build the site from the ground up because we had a problem – how we would use the language. The original legacy system that ASOS was built upon didn’t accommodate the Chinese script. We then had to face some very difficult choices, it’s not always easy.”
Earlier in the panel session, Bobroff shared his view that the fashion industry had come “kicking and screaming” into the tech world, citing ASOS and Net-a-Porter as brands causing a change in the status quo.