Toppers

Its a done deal, after a brief flirtation with fast fashion billionaires Boo Hoo, Topshop, or should that be the artist formally known as Topshop?

has been bought by online fashion giants ASOS, the multi branded website that started out life known as As seen on screen hence the Acronym.

The multi million pound deal includes Topshop, Topman & Miss Selfridge, a few hundred head office staff, designers and buyers etc but doesn’t include any of the 400 UK stores or the brands own e-commerce website, which means a slew of redundancies will inevitably follow.

And just like that, the trail blazing shop that was once the Saturday afternoon destination for all teenagers, the shop that democratised personal shopping by offering their style advisor service free to everyone, whose London Oxford Circus Flagship store was so famous it was a tourist attraction in its self.

The Topshop name will live on on ASOS, and will no doubt feature as part of ASOS’s plan to conquer America, if you remember Topshop launched in New York in 2014 to critical success but folded their US arm in 2019, ASOS must believe there is still an appetite for Topshop brand of “London Cool”  So what will become of the high street? More charity shops and bookmakers? I jolly well hope not.

I sit firmly and comfortably in the demographic that likes to shop at bricks & mortar stores (the over 30s if you want me to draw a line in the sand) Online is a wonderful convenience and it works exceptionally well, but there is a magic about a great in store experience, the appealing scent ,the personal service,  Beauty Departments have been banking on this for years, only Covid-19 burst that bubble, hopefully only temporarily.

My hopes for the high street is that green shoots will appear in the form of pop-up shops, temporary spaces where smaller independent brands who usually sell online can be seen in real life without the constraints of annual rents and crippling business rates, creating opportunity for diverse shopping experience, rotating every few weeks to satisfy the customers demand for newness and making the high street, dare i say it…interesting??