e’d be, that’s always a nice place to be and I think that’s off the back of us investing in the market, like our free returns. It’s made a huge difference and it’s been about making sure our proposition is consistent across all the markets and we really value the Aussie customers. Tell us about the new tall and plus-size menswear ranges At ASOS, we aim to bring a wide range of fashion to our 20-somethings customer so that they can look and feel their best.  With this in mind, we have extended the menswear size range enabling us to properly cater for guys of all sizes. We now stock 24 brands with a larger size range (XXXS – XXXXL, fits for over 6’3 and 38″ leg length) and will continue to develop this with an ASOS own branded range, a few items are now on site with the main collection dropping at the end of January 2017. What are the different ways that you market to your male and female shoppers? If you look at our homepages, you’ll see the way we pitch content is very different for women versus men. On the womenswear homepage, it’s very much about inspiration, so we’ll probably use more editorial terminology around our different trends, whereas for men, it’s very much about the categories – it’s t-shirts or it’s sneakers, it’s very much around ‘I have a need’ whereas women have a want to be inspired. That said, if you are looking for specific item, you go through that category channel. But I think women are much more likely to be inspired regular shoppers, whereas men we see are very much, ‘This is my budget, this is what I need, I’m going to by it all in one go, I’m done’. We see more browsing behaviour with women than men. I’m generalising, but this is across the board and off the back of research, men react more to a product type, whereas women want that inspiration and emotion behind the whole shopping journey. What other ranges will you be launching in 2017? We have started to expand our sports range and ASOS’ own brand will be launching next year. At the moment, we’re starting to sell more performance wear from brands Nike and Adidas, as opposed to just the street fashion. There’s a huge opportunity for sportswear to be an always-on category, so this is something we want to pursue. Like many retailers, Adidas and Nike are some of our top performers – we’re seeing triple digit growth year-on-year in those categories across the brands. So from our perspective, it’s a really important category globally. For us, it’s about focusing on it from both a fashion and performance perspective, and understanding the nuances in the various markets and seeing what people are actually looking for. Our first true lingerie set went live in September last year followed by ‘Bodies’ in October. We launched a new set in both November and December, with positive reactions to them both. Going into SS17, we have nine sets to come through, which include the first bridal ‘Curve’ set. Our plus-size bras start at size 30DD and go to 44HH and we currently cover size 18-30 on bodies and shapewear. The best selling territory for ‘Curve’ lingerie is the USA, followed by Australia. How have customers taken to the free returns which ASOS launched in Australia a few months ago? You’d assume when you launch free returns that return rates will go through the roof but they haven’t, and I think that’s quite interesting. Germany is known for very high return rates, it’s accepted customer behaviour. They’ll go online and buy three of everything, then return two and keep one. That’s just how they shop online. In general, customers here are more considered with their purchases, especially if they buy branded goods – maybe they’ve gone into a store and tried them on beforehand. Just because you launch free returns doesn’t necessarily mean return rates go through the roof, so I think customers have been behaved in a consistent way. What retail trends are on your radar at the moment? For me, the focus going into January is going into that big data piece. People have been talking about it for years and years and I’m yet to see any actionable trading insight come of the back off it. The exciting thing for us is we’ve invested heavily into it. There are some very intelligent people sitting in the UK office, putting all this data into a big lake, slicing and dicing it into different ways and for me, that results in having a much deeper insight into our customer behaviour. As a business, we have so many functions – everyone from our retail and digital marketing teams to our non-paid marketing teams are all doing fantastic work, but it’s very difficult sometimes to link it all up, so you’re getting silo views of how campaigns or categories have performed, but what all this big data allows is for us to pull everything back and look at true customer behaviour. I think now, we’re going to be in a position to get a lot more actionable, tradeable insights that can really help us. I think it almost comes to a point of fine tuning. Now the focus for me is on optimising and tweaking, just to give the customer a better overall experience. Big data and personalisation go hand-in-hand. It’s hard to do properly without big data, which [needs to be] integrated into all your systems. I think we’re going to be in a really good position next year to do exciting things, especially through our app as well, which is such an important channel for us. So stay tuned. The app is a key channel that will keep getting bigger and bigger and we still very much believe in the value of apps. Some people don’t – the conversation goes back and forth about the importance of app, but it’s very important to us. You’ve mentioned before that the ultimate goal would be for Australian customers to have the same experience as UK customers. What would that involve for the business? It’s about looking at all the levels in proposition. Fundamentally, you almost start building a pyramid in e-commerce. So at the base level, it’s looking at things like, have we got a website? What is on the website product-wise? How much are we selling it for? How do we get it to the customer? How does the customer find it? How do the customers contact us if they have an issue? How do you build the brand layers on top of that? And I think, going through that, ASOS has done incredibly well. ASOS has grown so fast and UK was our home market, but if you look at where we’ll be in 2020, we’re a global business. But essentially, you can’t go to market in every single country with that level of proposition. So I think to your point about how we give the customer the same experience globally, it is about those building blocks and as a country as a market grows, it’s about making sure you tick a box so everything is on par. Being realistic, you can’t go everywhere full-throttle, it’s about building it up. So right now, price investment and thinking about if we’re fairly priced in the market is a priority. Are we doing everything we can to get the product as fast as we can based on distribution? And are we giving them all the channels to give it back to us if it’s not right, like free returns? If you look at the US and Australia, telephone customer care is really important, so again, it’s about having that focus and making sure we’ll get that in place next. In other markets, telephone customer care is not a big deal. And if you do put something out in the market and it doesn’t resonate, take it out. When I go to the UK, I sit with the global trading team, the common language is English, but it’s not everyone’s mother tongue, so the team brings a lot of insight into what’s working in their markets and then prioritises activations and projects accordingly. If something works in one market, we can easily trial it in others and visa versa. Likewise, we collect insight at a global level so we can easily see what is important for our customers in each market and which markets are most similar. We experienced a really late winter last year and a lot of retailers struggled to manage their stock across seasons. What are your plans for winter this year? We’re going to the do the same as last year, because it was a really good season for us. The business is becoming more focused on global trading, so an element of that is counter seasonality, so obviously, the southern hemispheres do make up a smaller proportion of sales, just based on the population in the northern hemisphere versus southern. We have a certain percentage of buys that are counterseasonal, so it means we’ve almost got a full range on the site all the time. Last year, we went into autumn/winter with some amazing spring style trend items that performed really well, so we had great conversion, while having the heavier styles on the site. We’re sort of pleasing both markets. That will continue to build and play out each season. Being online, our turnaround times are a lot shorter, so we can get things out to market quickly. But I do think there’s a shift in how consumers shop over a longer period. In the past, you used to wait for the change of season and invest in a coat, even if it was 40 degrees, because you were excited about that change. I think now, customers just want it when they want it. And if it’s hot on the weekend, they want that outfit for the weekend, so retailers have to be much more aware that they can’t just stick with those seasonal changes, it has to be a lot more reactive. We have this debate regularly. In March, we were switching out to full winter, but actually, everyone was still going to the beach, so did it really make sense? Is our content tying into where our customers are shopping? That’s a big focus for us this year and testing what’s the biggest driver – newness from a seasonal perspective, or newness in that it suits the weather this weekend.