ASOS, the online fashion retailer, has always been a smart operation.

When its warehouses were destroyed in the Buncefield depot explosions in December 2005 on its busiest day of the year, it lost £3.8m worth of stock, had to cancel Christmas, refund 19,000 orders and suspend the company’s share price.

Unlike many, it was insured to the hilt and had a robust disaster recovery plan. When it reopened six weeks later it took a record number of sales on day one.

With a record for resilience, an economic downturn wasn’t likely to see ASOS roll over and die then. Once again it has found itself well prepared, welcoming shoppers flocking to it from the high street with sales up 95% during the 13 weeks leading up to June 27.

It’ll look to further capitalise on their thirst for a bargain by launching a clearance website for excess and discounted stock and offer an alternative to the roaring clothing trade on eBay.

“Everyone is waiting us to take a stumble and the good news is we absolutely haven’t,” said CEO Nick Robertson today while announcing full year profits had more than doubled to £7.3m (3.4m) on turnover which increased to £81m from £42.6m in the year to March 31. Margins and average spend were also up, while its share price has tripled inside a year.

Just goes to show if you get your model and proposition right, and keep one eye on what's around the corner, there's plenty of life left in retail.

Should women be treated differently in business? As a man I’ve never really felt qualified to give an opinion on this one, but shared plenty of debates with women who’ve passionately defended / rubbished the need for female-only business groups, networking events, awards etc.

At the core of this comes the belief that women do or don’t face greater or different challenges than men, or, less tangibly, do business in a different way.

Three things got me thinking about it again this week:

Firstly, Rachel Elnaugh prompted accusations of sexism when she claimed women are more ‘emotionally attached’ to their businesses than men. She’s backed it up using stats from her Entrepreneur Profiler data which shows 54% of men were motivated by money and material drivers as opposed to 34% of women who instead pointed to emotional drivers.

Secondly, Enterprising Women launched a £10m fund in conjunction with Lloyds TSB to finance loans, training and mentoring. UK female entrepreneurs can borrow up to £30,000. Chief exec Bev Hurley says there’s a real need for it:

“Women say that they are often discouraged from seeking business loans, have been advised that re-mortgaging their homes would be a better, or the only, way of financing their business, charged a higher interest rate. They also report that some funders still have very traditional assumptions and stereotypes about women's enterprise.”

There are of course, plenty of exceptions. When the government announced plans at the last Budget for a new £12.5m fund for entrepreneurs I was impressed by Texperts founder Sarah McVittie’s reaction. “I’m not sure we even need it but £12.5m is actually quite insulting if it’s for every business woman in the country. I’ve raised £3m on my own, so what's the point?”

Finally, we’re busy building the real Smarta site due to launch in November and still can’t decide whether to include a specific space for female entrepreneurs.

We're leaning more to McVittie than Hurley or Elnaugh, and it all feels, well, archaic; and by putting people in boxes surely you're only perpetuating the problem not solving it? Love to hear your views.

Image: Flickr

Big respect to real estate company MEPC (nope, I’d never heard of them before either), which is building a £6m incubator entirely from its own funds at its business park in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

The incubator will house 60 university spin-outs and will be run by Oxford Innovation, a specialist facilities management and angel investment company.

It’s great to see such a project coming out of private money, as the flexible lease demands and high failure rate of science start-ups that tend to occupy incubators usually put off developers and commercial landlords.

Speaking to the FT, James Dipple, MD for MEPC Milton Keynes, said: “We are providing a space for start-ups because some of them will grow into big companies.”

The Carbon Trust Standard certificate looks interesting, especially if you’re a genuinely eco-friendly company who’s become sick of the legions of ‘greenwashers’ jumping on the bandwagon.

The certicificate will only be awarded to companies that can prove to have measured emissions and reduced their carbon footprint year-on-year.

Crucially, offsetting doesn’t count.

So no more chartering private jets to commute to your air-conditioned London office where everything is left guzzling power 24/7 then claiming you’re greener than green for bunging a tree farmer in Devon the odd sweetener.

Joking aside, offsetting is great as long as it comes in addition to genuine cuts to emissions and too many businesses at present are selling to the green pound without doing so.

Find out more here: www.carbontruststandard.com

Smarta found this exclusive preview of the new Moo business cards and couldn't resist sharing.

Founded by Richard Moross, Moo's cool small, image-led business cards offered a fresh approach to the most staid of business stationery.

Brilliant for promoting your business and networking, they've become a badge of the web 2.0 crowd. The second generation look even better and should appeal to a wider audience.

According to the Moo website you can now:

- Use up to 50 different images per pack
- Choose from a range of templates for the reverse
- Upload your logo or image, and select from a new range of fonts and colours
- Choose Moo ‘Green’ 100% recycled, 100% recyclable and bio-degradable paper

And, just as importanly, they're still super value for £10.99 for 50 cards. We'll certainly be ordering ours and are tipping Moo to go on to even greater things.

So Heinz has banned its Deli Mayo TV advert featuring two men sharing a kiss and apologised to the 202 people who complained to the Advertising Standards Committee it was "offensive" , "inappropriate to see two men kissing" and "unsuitable to be seen by children".

Nigel Dickie, director of corporate affairs for Heinz UK, said: "It is our policy to listen to consumers. We recognise that some consumers raised concerns over the content of the ad and this prompted our decision to withdraw it.”

So now Heinz has appeased the 202 offended by the sight of single sex couples, what will it do to calm the 3.6 million-strong UK gay population it has disowned? Besides, how did Heinz know the 202 were more representative of its 'family' image?

Damage limitation or disastrous knee-jerk PR? See what you think:

Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Five independent hair salons within walking distance of each other in London’s Soho locked up for the day by 7pm this evening just as the streets were beginning to fill with their target clientele.

Four of the five are also closed on Sundays, the day most people have the least to do. At least two thirds of the surrounding shops shared the same opening hours. A few minutes’ walk to Oxford Street and the big brands were still milking every minute of shoppers’ paradise.

Am I missing something here? Can small independent traders really afford to turn away business?

I guess it tells you who's running a lifestyle business and working the hours they want and who's running a profit driven business servicing the hours its customers' prefer.

Thing is it needn't even mean working longer hours, maybe just smarter hours. For instance, I'd wager all the salons I passed tonight could take more money from 7-9pm than the 10am-12noon they're open for.

You’ve probably already heard about the £4,000 hair salon boss Sarah Desrosiers was this week ordered to pay Bushra Noah for ‘injury to feelings’ when an employment tribunal upheld a claim of indirect discrimination after Desrosiers declined to employ the 19-year-old Muslim on the grounds she intended to wear a headscarf while working.

The tribunal rejected a claim of religious discrimination after accepting Desrosiers' defence that she expects all staff to sport hairstyles reflecting the ‘funky, urban’ image of her salon and that she’d also not employed Noah because she lived too far away.

The story has prompted a rather predictable ‘political correctness gone mad’ reaction underlined by a rather more sinister eagerness to carry headlines with the word ‘Muslim’ juxtaposed to a hardworking British business person going about their everyday business.

Lame journalism hides what’s actually an interesting case. Now, Desrosiers, of course, is perfectly entitled to demand the role involves sporting the coolest cuts. She insists she’d have had the same objection to someone wearing a baseball cap and there’s no evidence whatsoever she intended to upset or discriminate.

For a £34,000 legal claim to arise from a 15-minute interview is, frankly, scary.

This is where most business titles start ranting about how business owners are being shafted by red tape and how the law’s an ass. Now I’ll bang the business drum louder than anyone, but not when it’s futile. The law is the law and simply calling it an ass doesn’t really help.

What’s not been highlighted is whether Desrosiers stipulated the requirement in her job ads or description. If she didn’t, then technically Noah could have been overlooked for a reason that wasn’t relevant to her ability to do the job or applied to other candidates.

I’m not suggesting that happened – but it does happen. The law is murky deliberately to ensure tribunal panels get to the bottom of intent in individual cases. While the £4,000 fine is certainly questionable, the panel’s decision to reject Noah’s primary claim is actually a victory, not defeat, for common sense.

Employment law can feel like a minefield and Desrosiers is possibly justified in feeling hard done by, but providing you make a clear job description and apply your criteria consistently during recruitment you’ve very little to worry about. Be vague and then change the rules, no matter how innocently, and you’re opening yourself up to trouble.

When I logged onto Facebook this morning I had two invites to join groups outraged at supposed claims the world’s leading social network was set to start charging a monthly subscription fee.

As it was so obviously not true I didn’t bother to join the collective rant. Tempting as it was, neither did I join the conspiracy theorists claiming Mark Zuckerberg et al at Facebook had set up the group to test user reaction to the concept.

A quick Google to double check confirmed but did get me thinking when I stumbled on an interview with Guy Kawasaki, celebrated marketer, VC, blogger and columnist for the US magazine Entrepreneur. He says if he owned Twitter, where he has a huge following, he’d start charging $30 a month to make it better.

Surely we’ve been here before and exhausted the argument? This web 1 rhetoric being applied to web 2.0 experience isn't just archaic it seems almost impossible to make work.

Paid for premium email died overnight when Google launched 1GB’s worth for free. Any value add service Facebook, Twitter or any other site attempted to charge for would simply set competitors, or new entries, scrambling to offer the same for free.

But then they do say all things are cyclical so perhaps subscription isn't as dead as we thought. Maybe the critical mass of Joe Public has more loyalty (or addiction) to Facebook, and possibly Twitter, than web 2.0 gospel has accounted for?

Would you pay to use a social enterprise or access your favourite site? Just as importantly would you consider charging for access/content?

Head on the blog (sic): there won’t be another internet crash. Ever. Sure some of the web 2.0 bandwagon jumpers will crash and burn taking VC dollar into the fire, but that’s no different to any other sector. And besides, internet isn’t a sector anymore, it’s just business.

If you need proof, take a look at the study released today by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that revealed internet advertising is poised to leapfrog TV as the UK’s dominant format.

Currently accounting for 15% compared to TV at 19%, online spend will more than double over the next five years to represent 35% of all advertising in the UK.

Internet consumption, spend and enterprise is being driven by the ‘net generation’ of those born between 1977 and 1997, claims the study, whose preferred media is the internet. Oblivious to technology they’re driving the digital sectors, absorbing over 20 hours of media a day, compared to their elders who watch just 20 hours of TV a week.

With 30% of the UK population under 25 it all adds up to a business boon for advertisers, according to PwC's head of entertainment and media Phil Stokes:

“So long as companies are clear and upfront about specific policies and practices, net gen’ers are comfortable sharing private information in exchange for a more relevant and customised entertainment and media experience.

“Responding to the net generation is a global phenomenon. In countries such as Brazil, people under the age of 25 comprise 43% of the country’s total population. This figure is as high as 50% in India. Engagement with this digitally minded generation will guarantee growth in the digital market as they enter the workforce, and as income per person increases.”

Consequently, the study also predicted greater convergence between entertainment and media companies.

The economy might be stagflating but internet spend isn’t. Web 2.0 crash? No chance. Any companies that slip away just won’t be good enough companies and surely that’s perfectly natural?

Image: Flickr