The Missguided documentary shows a lot is wrong – but they must also be doing something right

Some believe it was a PR disaster for the online fast-fashion brand – for all the failings on display, however, there was an energy and a challenge to traditional views of high-street retail, writes Chris Blackhurst

The online fast-fashion brand featured in a Channel 4 documentary (Getty Images for Missguided)

A few years ago, I recall one of our best-known fashion retail moguls explaining to me why he had little faith in internet shopping. People – especially girls and young women, his target audience – he opined would always like the experience of going to the high street on a Saturday afternoon to browse, choose and try on clothes together.

I was thinking about him when I watched Inside Missguided: Made in Manchester, the Channel 4 documentary series about life at the offices of one our most successful online fast-fashion brands. If ever there was evidence as to how wrong he was, it was there, on the screen.

There are those who insist that the programme is an unmitigated PR disaster. I disagree. I’m observing the goings-on, hearing the constant swearing and repeated, tedious pronouncements about “female empowerment” from the largely all-female staff, and wincing. They say they want the label to appeal to all sizes, not just the skinny, yet promptly go to Ibiza to seek inspiration, and show interest only in the ultra-glamorous women who most resemble supermodels.

Likewise, they tell us how they believe in the highest ethical standards from their supply chain, having publicly come a cropper a while back, and are then seen haggling over tiny amounts of money, and visiting a factory in Leicester where you just know the workers are paid meagre sums for their long, hard hours of toil.

Throughout is the sense that their consumers are watching the same material they’re watching; they like what they see, and they want it right now

There’s the environmental damage too. Theirs is a sector that produces tonnes of garments, consuming vast resources in the process, only for much of that output to find its way to landfill sites when it is unsold or discarded in favour of the next “must have” item.

You can leave, as well, the whole over-repeated “Manchester” thing. Is the Northern city the hottest place in the world for creativity? Really?

They also display a totally haphazard approach. They seem to book locations for advertising shoots without first checking what the actual backdrop will be like. A dreary stairwell is a dreary stairwell, even in a supposedly trendy district of London. A rooftop may appeal, but not if the view is of, er, other flat, boring rooftops.

I can go on, and pick faults. I could question their own morality – they see something and then blatantly get as close to copying it as they can without exactly copying it; someone’s genius went into making it look so good, but it wasn’t theirs – and that person’s brilliance goes unrecognised and unrewarded.

But all my reservations, and those of the critics who have panned the programme, are those of folk who don’t get it. Missguided is not for us. It’s not aimed at us; we don’t rush to check the website for the latest creations (which run into the hundreds, every single month) and we don’t have a clue as to the latest Instagram influencers they’re using to promote their wares. They dress up a limousine in garish pink and put Gemma Collins in the back and drive her around London during Fashion Week. We cringe at the sheer tackiness. But the tabloids cover the spectacle, then the accompanying video goes viral and the Missguided website is swamped.

What comes across brashly loud and clear is the sheer energy. This is a firm, we’re informed relentlessly (in a sign that they’re not at all stupid, Missguided made sure the person doing the voiceover is one of their own staff – so this is not objective reporting, of the sort that may ask awkward questions) that “lost £26m in 2018”. Pause for effect. “That’s right, a cool £26m.” Then we’re told, it “is now on the way back”.

It’s never properly explained how they managed to take such a hit, but they closed their bricks-and-mortar store, in Westfield Stratford City, and made substantial redundancies. Somehow, they called the market wrong and over-ordered stock that did not sell. We’re invited to believe they’ve learned their lesson, and certainly, given the constant references, the loss still weighs heavily.

Onwards, though. And they do exhibit a fierce competitiveness and desire to succeed. There is no denying their impressive work rate. Their turnarounds from conception to sale are ferociously quick. Throughout is the sense that their consumers are watching the same material they’re watching; they like what they see, and they want it right now; and if they cannot get it immediately from Missguided, they will go somewhere else, to Boohoo or PrettyLittleThing or Misspap instead. So much for waiting for a trip up to the shops with your pals.

My retail mogul may have been correct when he said they enjoy shopping together, but he left out the sheer hassle of getting to a town or city centre. They also like trying on clothes in their own homes at their leisure. Whatever they don’t like can go back, easily – the likes of Missguided have got the returns service off to an art.

As Missguided was leaving us spellbound, and causing some to shake their heads in disgust, Marks & Spencer unveiled another 7,000 redundancies. Now, I know that M&S’s customers are hardly the sort that would buy from Missguided, but oh, how the dear old chain could do with the onliner’s zap and verve.

No – my tycoon, it’s so obvious, was hopelessly misguided in saying what he said.