Asos launches new campaign for Collusion, focus on 2019's creative collaborators

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 22, 2019

When Asos reported its first-half results a couple of weeks ago it offered a glowing report for its still-new Collusion line. The label had launched last year and the company said it was its most successful launch ever.

So it’s no surprise that the fashion e-tail giant is putting more support behind it this year and the 2019 offer sees it repeating-but-evolving its 2018 strategy with a whole new set of youth collaborators. 

And on the marketing front, while the debut offer came with a film featuring 100 18-year-olds, this time the marketing campaign seems to have a closer focus on a smaller number of individuals. 

The campaign featuring its new brand 'collaborators' launches this week, on April 23. The key thrust of this sees Collusion partnering with female-led online community radio station foundation.fm for four weeks of live shows with the collaborators, who are made up of a group of articulate, activist and engaged 17-22 year-olds.

And they won’t really be talking about fashion (nothing quite so outdated). Instead, the aim is to discuss topics such as “gender identity, the pressures of social media, female representation in the tech industry and coming-of-age in the modern era.”

In case you didn’t know, Collusion is a gender-fluid line that was co-created with a revolving group of students, stylists, activists, image-makers, authors and YouTubers. These collaborators were seen as being crucial to getting into the mindset of the youth consumer, hence the collaborator concept continuing and being regularly refreshed with new faces.

The seven young people who make up the new collaborator ‘board of directors’ were fairly quietly brought together last month, but they’ll now be at the forefront of a major publicity drive for the label to move it into its first full year of trading.

Its foundation.fm link-up starts with Collusion’s Oscar O’Sullivan (a film-making student who was one of the 100 18-year-olds who starred in the brand’s debut film last October) joining host Zooey for the station’s Queer Island Discs. They’ll discuss finding their gender identity and sense of community in 2019. O’Sullivan will also bring four of his favourite tracks that will play in between the discussion.

A week later, host Kesang will be joined by the brand’s Laila Katumba (a singer and computer scientist) and vlogger Antonia Jade to discuss female representation in the tech industry and growing up in the social media age, as part of the radio station’s Forward Slash series.

Seven days after that, there’s more of a clear focus on the label itself with radio host Kamilla talking to Collusion’s Nadia Ahmed (an 18-year-old singer), plus student and diversity campaigner Yomi Olufidipe and vegan A-level student Lilly Thompson, about what Collusion means to them. They’ll also discuss “how the label has helped shape their careers and social media persona.”

Then the last part of the takeover on May 14 sees Collusion’s Hannah Alkindi, who thinks “fashion and politics go hand-in-hand”, featuring in Foundation’s Future Girl Corp series, focusing on female empowerment and giving women the skills to start their own businesses.

It’s an interesting approach for a brand that has promised to evolve continuously and one that could very easily have gone down like a damp squib. But Asos appears to have done its homework with this label, with the result that it’s been a hit for the company.

In its results report, it said the label sold 1.5 million units during the first half and this number made it a “top 10 brand” for the e-tailer. It added that its full price sell-through was above the group average and that within the UK, Collusion was the most searched brand on Asos.