Faster fashion: ‘If a trend comes, we need to have it on our site in under a week’

There is a fashion that fashion likes to ignore. Here is one of its imaginary clothes rails: a pair of crocheted white shorts, a fringed suedette jacket. Flick, flick. A maxi skirt slashed to the thigh, tops with backs or fronts cut out. Each item costs £20 or less and its main ingredient lies somewhere between 95% viscose and 100% polyester. Fashion’s wardens do not like to acknowledge these clothes, which live mostly in exile from Vogue and the highbrow style magazines. They shadow the wardrobes of celebrities rather than Parisian or London catwalks and the labels carry strange sounding names: Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing, Shelikes, Missguided. These are a new crop of digital fashion brands. Their shopfronts are Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. They push out looks rather than innovate in design. Yet together they are at the forefront of a revolution in the digital fashion industry – a second wave of fast fashion.

The figures are impressive. Missguided’s turnover has gone from £8m three years ago to £55m for the past financial year. Boohoo’s sales were £50.8m for the four months to December. But these brands don’t come from where you think they do. Far from being faceless multinationals, all four are startups born in Manchester, in the streets still dominated by the architecture of the textile industry. Their founders are the descendents of immigrants who found work in Britain in the rag trade, and stayed in it. Now these entrepreneurs are using the decades-old skills and networks of the textile industry to map the desires of the digital consumer.
Missguided’s office, on an industrial estate on the edge of Salford, is full of empty chairs, soon to be occupied. Growth has been so fast that it employed 253 new people in the first half of last year. Bright and breezy clothes hang on rails – as worn by Nicole Scherzinger (who is a “brand ambassador” for the company, fronting the “Nicole X” range), Ellie Goulding, Fearne Cotton, Little Mix, Katy B and countless others. Walls are pasted with slogans. “Don’t make sense, make dollars.” “Wake up, kick ass, repeat.” Across the boardroom window, giant stickers spell the word L-O-V-E.