ASOS unveils reborn Topshop, Topman as key part of international strategy

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 29, 2022

ASOS on Thursday announced a “bold new visual identity” for its Topshop and Topman brands that features on the standalone digital shopfront on its webstore.

AW22 will mark the first season for Topshop and Topman collections conceived, designed and created entirely under ASOS ownership, “reinvigorating the product offering with a stronger focus on creative design and quality fabrication”.

The retailer has been “inspired by signage from old Topshop and Topman stores and, “updated for the future, the visual identity appears as a new digital storefront on a standalone landing page on ASOS.com. A new monogram tells the story of two heritage brands, uniting under one banner with a shared DNA”.

The company added: “Known as a fashion authority that captures the spirit of London culture, the new chapter of Topshop and Topman will introduce reinvigorated collections with a laser focus on quality, design, fit and fabric. This means continuing to elevate and evolve the brand’s most popular categories, such as denim, dresses and tailoring, but pushing boundaries to ensure Topshop and Topman empower people to self-express through their choice of clothing.”

The renaissance will come with the brands introducing truly inclusive sizing for the first time through the Curve range, as well as further investing in its Maternity, Tall and Petite collections. AW22 will also introduce a series of limited-edition pieces that are “the purest expression of Topshop and Topman’s new vision, with key designs manufactured in the UK”.

It’s interesting that the video on the webstore and on social media accompanying the relaunch shows a quick flash of a model on an escalator, a clear nod to the famous escalator that carried shoppers into the giant basement store that Topshop occupied for ceases at Oxford Circus.

Director of the brands Nikki Tattersall called the two labels “truly iconic” British brands and said the last 18 months have seen the company doing “some incredible work, learning from the past and from each other to create something exciting and relevant for the future. This is only the first step of the journey. There’s a lot more work to do and so many exciting ideas we want to explore.”

The two labels have been around since the 1960s and under Jane Shepherdson and her successors in the late 1990s and 2000s, Topshop was hugely influential. Its Oxford Circus flagship was a must-visit store both for consumers with a mass-market budget and for those whose regular purchases were closer to the luxury end of the price scale.

But the brands struggled in recent years and were acquired in February 2021 by ASOS after the collapse of Arcadia.

This saw them become digital-first with standalone stores closing. But they saw a return to physical retail via a deal with Nordstrom. That deal now takes in 106 Nordstrom stores in North America and has become a central part of ASOS’s international growth strategy.