Ecommerce director New Look

Cutting his teeth in fashion etail at Arcadia, McBrien has moved to New Look to execute an ambitious plan to be the biggest UK fashion retailer online in the next three years.

As its second generation website went live in March, McBrien’s aim was to pass Asos and Next in terms of site traffic. Before the new site launched, New Look already had about 1.5 million visitors a week.

McBrien believes that Next’s catalogue heritage and Asos’ lack of stores means New Look can leapfrog them in the next few years.

He says: “Next has had 20 years of its catalogue and has its heritage and its database, but we have a lot of new features on this site. Asos doesn’t have stores. We can multichannel and they can’t.”

If New Look can get its multichannel offer to these heights then it will have another interesting angle for potential investors. It was unable to pull off a float this year, so growth through multichannel is important.

Other retailers will be waiting to see if McBrien goes down the external brands route in any big way online, as this has helped drive the traffic to both Next’s and Asos’ sites.