If you live in America, you've probably never heard of Missguided.
I had never heard of it either until I was laying on my couch watching an episode of "Bob's Burgers" last week and this commercial kept playing:
"What is this Nasty Gal knock off?" I wondered. Because I was on Hulu, the targeted ad kept looping over and over again every single commercial break until I finally broke down and had to look up what Missguided even was.
Turns out, it's an e-commerce store in the vein of ASOS and the brainchild of 32-year-old Nitin Passi. It's huge in the United Kingdom when it comes to brand recognition, mainly thanks to its partnership with pop star Nicole Scherzinger, formerly of the Pussycat Dolls, who has designed a few collections with the brand since 2013.
And in the UK, it's performing incredibly well. Missguided sales are now over £86 million pounds, or $130 million, according to The Telegraph. Missguided's founder Passi told This Is Money that he has plans to increase sales to over £150 million pounds by next March.
A lot of the success has come from social media, Passi told Internet Retailing. The brand's Instagram has 984,000 followers, its UK Twitter account has 331,000, and its Facebook has 827,000 followers.
The e-commerce site is now expanding into the US and making a big push to appeal to American consumers - sort of like an online version of Topshop, which was huge in the U.K. before jumping stateside. In addition to their Hulu ad, Missguided has launched at Nordstrom stores and has also expanded into athletic wear.
The brand got its start back in 2008 after founder Passi had been living and working in the New York fashion industry with his father.
"I lived there for two years, and got kind of a grounding in the fashion business - everything from design, traveling the world with designers, to production, spending a lot of time out in China and selling as well," he told Fashionista in a 2014 interview.
After returning to London, Passi decided it was time to start his own fashion-based company. Basing his model loosely on other online retailers, he got a loan from his father for £50,000 or just under $80,000 to start his own e-commerce site and launched Missguided in 2009 in a 100-square-foot room in Manchester.
Six years later, the brand now has 210 employees and compares itself to Zara or ASOS when it comes to bringing consumers fast fashion. With daily new collections and as many as 200 new products every week, Passi said that the quick turnaround keeps 30% of consumers coming back daily to see the new designs.
"We are not fast fashion, we are rapid fashion," Passi told the Financial Times. "We are bringing in collections every day. […] We are already asking how can we do it several times a day?"
And while the brand has expanded rapidly, it hasn't done so without a few growing pains. Customers began complaining that their orders were wrong and that returns were too difficult in 2014.
The brand has since stepped up its social media game, and attempts to reply to every single customer complaint online.
But growth concerns aside, it appears Missguided is looking forward. The latest project is for a new office in Manchester with a helicopter pad on the rooftop and a dance floor with DJ booth. Passi also said he wants to take the brand global.
"Right now, 80% of our business is in the UK, and we're seeing really strong growth figures internationally and demand for our brand internationally," Passi told Fashionista. "I want to make Missguided a global, household name - whether that's online or whether that's in stores, I'm not set on that. What I've got is a brand and I want to get that around the world, that's the number one goal now."