Asos is a popular global fashion site from the UK that sells clothing, accessories, shoes, jewelry, makeup, cosmetics and more, with an emphasis on fun, colorful fashion experience at affordable prices. This fashion site offers more than 80,000 different products and 850 brands, as well as their own brand, “ASOS”, which is a young and trendy fashion brand.
They set an impressive goal which is to sell to customers the exact product they see on the screen. That is the meaning for the name “asos”, which is the initial of “As Seen On Screen”. In order for shipments to reach customers quickly, ASOS has a number of supply centers throughout the world located in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and China.
Asos also supports environmental protection so they have banned cashmere, silk, and fur from all platforms that have been started since late January 2019. Not only stopped there, but Asos also launched an initiative to educate its designers about sustainable fashion by conducting pilot training about circular mode.
The pilot training program on the circular mode in collaboration with the Center for Sustainable Mode (CSF) of the London College of Fashion is part of the 2020 Circular Fashion Commitment that Asos promised will reach the Copenhagen Fashion Summit last year. This course will explore design techniques from upstream to downstream that take into account the entire life cycle of a product, rather than just creating something new.
ASOS Prohibits All The Fur Materials
The launch was held last January with 15 members of the Asos core design team were doing discussions and drop-in sessions. They will explore concepts, case studies, and practical applications of circular designs with experts from the CSF team. The pilot project will then be refined and launched in all Asos design departments.
“With this pilot project we ensure that our designers have the knowledge and skills they need to implement sustainability,” Vanessa Spence, design director at Asos, commented. “This is an important step in our journey to design circle products in mind from the start, which will ensure that these products are made responsibly, remain used as long as possible after they are sold, and do not cause unnecessary waste at the end of the product’s life. ”
Dilys Williams, director of the sustainable fashion center and fashion design professor for sustainability at the London College of Fashion, said: “It’s important for companies that are dynamic and forward-thinking like Asos to innovate from the perspective of critical information.”
Asos and The Copenhagen Fashion Summit
Indeed, at the 2018 Copenhagen Fashion Summit, Nicolaj Reffstrup, CEO of Ganni, stressed that it was up to big businesses to innovate and lead with industry best practices about traceability and transparency. As part of small and medium enterprises they do not have the skills or capacity to create innovative solutions. That is the reason why Asos came up as the solution to help the SMEs.
“We need to describe the vision of what the circular economy looks like,” Ellen MacArthur, who launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to inspire generations to rethink, redesign, and build a positive circular economy for the future, she added: “In times of creativity and innovation, why do we turn something into waste?
By educating the creators of their clothes, Asos has changed the roots of its business which in time, will affect at least more than 140 more brands that are on their global retail platform.