Founder/Creative Director
Deborah Thorpe
Deborah is a highly experienced international television executive/producer and a creative entrepreneur.
Deborah is perhaps best known for co-founding ASOS Plc, the UK’s largest online fashion retailer.
Spotting the beginnings of the celebrity trend in the late 90s, Deborah and her two co-founders raised the money to set up an online retailer to sell clothes and products that had been seen on film and TV stars. The company was originally named AsSeenOnScreen.com and they later re-named it ASOS.com. Deborah was pivotal in setting up the business, selecting the original product lines and assembling the original team – including inviting longterm collaborator Lord Waheed Alli to join the board. She remained a shareholder until 2017.
Despite this extraordinary success in retail, Deborah’s first love remains animation in all its forms. She began her career at Channel 4 working on Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas, buying Pixar’s first short film Tin Toy, and Nick Park’s graduation film A Grand Day Out, which first introduced Wallace & Gromit to the world. She has worked with Nickelodeon, Disney, Sony, Universal, BBC, Channel 4, milkshake!, Discovery and many other global networks.
Deborah has worked as a development producer for Rob Minkoff (director of Disney’s The Lion King), on the Oscar winning short Bob’s Birthday, with Klasky Csupo (makers of The Simpsons) and on many more award winning and nominated shows. At Channel 4 Deborah was also part of the team that broke household names including Jonathan Ross, Frank Skinner, Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer, Jo Brand and many more.
Throughout her career Deborah has been attracted to and instrumental in creating certain interruptive and new business models, working on the first wave of advertiser funded programming (Cadbury, Pepsi, Royal Mail, Phillips), the first wave of social networks for kids and online drama (Bebo) as well as the first wave of online retail (asos)