• ABOUT YOU is growing much faster than planned: it already has more than one million active customers and sales in the hundreds of millions are anticipated in the current financial year 2016/17
•  The company’s value has reached €320 million after two years on the market – investors hold a minority stake
• ABOUT YOU is conquering the future market of fashion discovery online with its blend of inspirational content, personal recommendations and seamless integration on mobile devices

Everything points to further growth at ABOUT YOU. The fashion and technology company from Hamburg posted sales in the high tens of millions in the 2015/16 financial year (29 February 2016), with a figure three times higher than in the previous year. Sales are expected to more than double in the current financial year, reaching the hundreds of millions for the first time. This means that ABOUT YOU remains one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Europe. Its success is attracting new partners: in summer 2016, new investors took a minority stake in ABOUT YOU. The company’s value stands at €320 million.

ABOUT YOU is growing at a much faster rate than planned,’ says a delighted Hannes Wiese, co-founder and director of Operations and Finance at ABOUT YOU. ‘We are proud that investors are also impressed by our success and that our company value has risen so much within just two years that it exceeds our investments fourfold. We know of very few other companies which have achieved a comparable valuation in such a short time.’ With more than one million active customers and brand awareness of over 50 per cent among its target audience, ABOUT YOU is one of the largest online-only fashion retailers in Germany after just two years on the market.

ABOUT YOU conquers the future market of fashion discovery online

ABOUT YOU believes that the greatest e-commerce growth potential lies in the fashion discovery segment. Successful examples such as Spotify and Instagram have shown that the process of digital discovery primarily takes place on smartphones. More than 65 per cent of traffic at aboutyou.de already stems from mobile devices – and that figure is rising sharply. With this in mind, ABOUT YOU is taking its successful open commerce strategy to the next level. In the future, anyone will be able to develop user-generated content in the form of outfits, collages, photos, product lists and more on aboutyou.de using their smartphone. Users will not need any development skills, so the new feature will make fashion discovery accessible to a wide audience.

ABOUT YOU is continuing to make consistent use of personalisation to enable it to display only that which is relevant to each user from the variety of content generated in this way and the 100,000+ items in its product range. Based on an individual fashion profile, the personal recommendations only include suitable products and outfits which are tailored to the user’s interests. The new feature ‘Your trend of the week’ provides a further incentive to visit the site regularly, showing users 100 suitable new products each week with a 10% discount exclusively for them. Approximately half of users already regularly look at their trend of the week. ABOUT YOU is also adopting social network features by introducing profiles for brands, trends, cities, events and users. Having previously been able to follow celebrities and brands, users can now also follow one another and receive relevant updates regularly. With its blend of inspirational content, personal recommendations and seamless integration on mobile devices, ABOUT YOU has already achieved a significant increase in the frequency of orders per customer.

By conquering the fashion discovery segment online, ABOUT YOU is catering for the growing need for personalisation, inspiration and tailored services in fashion e-tailing and further building on its innovation leadership in the field of mobile shopping. Sebastian Betz, director of Tech and Product at ABOUT YOU, says: ‘By further developing our open commerce model, we are incentivising customers to use ABOUT YOU regularly. User-generated content is a source of constant inspiration, which we handle in a consistently personalised way within our fashion platform. This means that we occupy a gap in the market with huge potential.

Business poised to scale throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland

In terms of marketing, ABOUT YOU continues to focus on social media and influencer marketing to boost customer activity and acquisition cost-efficiently. The reach of influencers and brands in social networks translates into visits – and ultimately purchases – for ABOUT YOU. A new addition is the location-based approach: cities with their own profiles on ABOUT YOU – such as Hamburg-Eimsbüttel and Berlin-Kreuzberg – show their trademark looks. Customers can buy products to recreate these looks on the spot. Users can actively help to shape the city lookbooks and are informed about local events with corresponding outfit suggestions.

Other up-and-coming issues for ABOUT YOU are internationalisation and increasing brand awareness. ‘We had our beta launch in Austria and Switzerland last year. This financial year, we will ramp up our marketing activities and run TV advertising there too for the first time. Our aim for 2016 is to become one of the top five online fashion retailers throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland,’ commented Tarek Müller, director of Marketing and Brands at ABOUT YOU.