KEY POINTS:
Imagine all the fashion shops of London's Oxford Street available at a click of your mouse and you have some idea of ASOS, the only listed British retailer right now where sales are growing at 80 per cent a year.
On the website you can find more than 8,000 outfits and accessories, many of them remarkably similar to those worn recently by Sienna, Kate, Victoria and friends.
You can even see pictures of your favourite celebrities wearing the original, or watch a video clip of a model twirling in the outfit of your choice.
If you don't have the right belt, bag or bangle to go with that new dress, don't worry; a choice of accessories will pop up alongside the garment.
Do you need a pair of sunglasses? Just upload your photograph and click, click, click to see how the latest designer shades will look on you. Thank you, broadband.
You had better be quick, though, because 500 new items are added each month and when they are gone, they are gone - or WIGIG, as they say in the retail trade.
As the managements of Zara, H&M Hennes and Topshop know, creating the impression of scarcity is a wonderful way to keep that stock turning over fast, and that cash-flow flowing.
When ASOS announces full-year figures tomorrow, it will provide some welcome news in a depressing retail firmament.
Analysts expect profits before tax of at least £7m (NZ$18.3m) - more than double last year's £3m - on turnover of £80m (up from £43m).
They also expect the website's founder and chief executive, Nick Robertson, the great-grandson of Austin Reed, who gave us the quintessentially English menswear brand, to make bullish noises about future expansion plans.
The company will shortly open a new warehouse that should see it through the next five years, and Robertson wants to increase the range on offer.
"We hope to double the number of brands within 18 months," he explains.
Robertson is also in discussions with Sir Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia group, about selling Topshop clothes in the same way he already sells Karen Millen, Kookai and French Connection.
Topshop has its own online operation running alongside its retail stores, but if the right deal were to be struck, it could make sense for both sides.
Even without it, ASOS is the second most popular online clothing site to Next, with 4.6 per cent of the market, and some analysts are forecasting it will be number one in the UK within months.
Robertson started his career in the advertising industry with Young & Rubicam in 1987, but by 1995 he had co-founded Entertainment Marketing, which specialised in product placement around celebrities.
Five years later that morphed into ASOS, which was launched on AIM, the London market for growing companies, at the height of the dot-com boom that quickly became the dot-com crash.
The company struggled with capacity restraints and technical problems until 2004, when it made its first profit.
Since then, the site has grown to attract three million visits a month. Even the Buncefield oil refinery explosion at Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, which damaged ASOS's warehouse and closed the website over Christmas 2005, failed to set it back.
Typical ASOS customers are young working women who read UK magazines Heat and Grazia, like to party and do not yet have mortgages.
More than half of women in the UK between the ages of 16 to 24 now buy clothes online more than once a month.
And with 55 per cent of all households having broadband, that figure is likely to rise, especially as Robertson has attracted an impressive management team from "bricks and mortar" retailers such as M&S, Topshop and Selfridges.
In the past year ASOS shares have risen dramatically to 324p, outperforming the retail sector, admittedly a pretty mixed bag, by 300 per cent.
It is reasonable to expect the shares to mark time at some stage but the stellar performance has attracted the attention of the investment bank Cazenove, which recently produced a 30-page circular describing the speed of growth as "staggering" and is forecasting a further jump in profits to £12m for 2009.
To those who criticise ASOS's blatant exploitation of Britain's celebrity culture, Robertson has a robust reply: "All we are doing is showing clothes in the context of celebrities, which is what magazines have been doing for decades."
- INDEPENDENT
