A quarterly retail sales rise of 15% and total annual revenues up 27% to almost £1bn would normally be cause for throwing hats in the air.

A quarterly retail sales rise of 15% and total annual revenues up 27% to almost £1bn would normally be cause for throwing hats in the air.

But in the case of online fashion specialist Asos, the good news came with a sting in the tail of the one-time shooting star.

Gross margin was down by 640 basis points and profits in the new financial year are likely to be flat on the one just ended.

Asos has, for the time being at least, lost its status as a City darling as it battles to cope with everything from a warehouse fire to the heavy costs of establishing a business in China and the impact of currency fluctuations on its international operations.

While Asos’s value soared over a long period, many investors take a short-term approach so it’s no surprise that some former City fans now prefer market newcomer Boohoo over Asos.

The question is if and when Asos will get back on track. Tuesday’s update may have been disappointing but it also showed the business is not broken.

The number of active customers, order frequency, conversion rate and basket size were all up and investment is being made across the business to help reestablish its preeminence.

However broker Cantor Fitzgerald fears that Asos’s “damage limitation strategy has impacted the company’s entrepreneurial ethos and held back its evolution”.

It’s a good point. Asos has been built on the vision of founder Nick Robertson and many of its staff are just the sort of people who are also its shoppers, so well attuned to customer attitudes.

It’s hard to put a value on a company culture but it’s frequently a key determinant of success or failure. Keeping the original flame alive is an essential complement to the enhanced disciplines that are essential as a business grows.

It’s the fact that Asos has been pretty much a consistent success story over more than a decade that makes the setbacks of this year so disappointing.

Unwelcome as they may be, are there really signs that the etailer has lost its mojo in a way similar to Tesco?

Robertson maintains that Asos is focused on the long-term opportunity and sales of £2.5bn will be the next “staging post”.

To some that may come across as bluster in the circumstances, but it shows there is no shortage of “entrepreneurial ethos”.

And that will be crucial in putting Asos’s star in the ascendant once again.