Sir Philip Green’s Topshop and Miss Selfridge brands are to push into China with an agreement to launch on the ShangPin.com fashion retail website next month.
Sir Philip has long held the ambition of taking Topshop into China and already has two stores in Hong Kong. The retail billionaire said: “As we continue to grow our global expansion, this will be a step forward using the power of China’s online reach and therefore selling into one of the world’s most exciting consumer markets.”
The deal with local Chinese online retailer ShangPin.com is Sir Philip’s second foray into new areas of online retail this year. In May, he took a 25 percent stake in MySale, an Australian fashion sales site, and also struck a merchandising agreement with MySale to supply the company with excess inventory in fashion and home-ware from his high street empire.
ShangPin.com is an online multi-brand retailer of designer and contemporary fashion, and said it had more than 5 million customers. David Zhao, Chief Executive, said: “In the last two years, we have been building China’s most ‘fashionable’ online customer database, and being online means we have our finger on the pulse of what the consumer needs. China’s new fashion consumers are in their 20s-30s and are moving away from big logos to being fashion forward, and wanting to express their individuality through mixing and matching styles and brands.”
ShangPin said China’s generation born in the 1980s and 1990s could spend up to 30 percent of their day online or on mobiles.
SOURCE: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101915316
