In London, you are never meant to be more than 6ft away from a rat, even if you can't see one. Today in the UK – by my scientific reckoning – you are never more than six feet away from a bit of Superdry. You know the clothes even if you think you don't. Look around: on the bus there'll be someone carrying a rucksack with Japanese writing. On a rush-hour train several Suits will be wearing a lightweight jacket with too many zips. Turn on the TV and Jamie Oliver will be ripping up some basil for Sainsbury's wearing a checked shirt. Your barista is wearing a vintage-looking T-shirt with a huge number printed on it, which looks familiar but doesn't appear to mean anything. These are all Superdry clothes: unisex, ubiquitous yet anonymous; sporty yet not technical; designed but not designer. This week, SuperGroup, the company that owns streetwear label Superdry has, yet again, proved itself the indestructible superhero on the high street. On Wednesday, the retailer reported retail sales up 48% since April, its pre-tax profits stand at £50.2m and its share price has City analysts yelling: "Buy, buy!"

At a time when the British public have lost their taste for sugary continental chocolates from Thorntons and designer bedside lamps from Habitat, the appetite for faux-sporty discreetly logo-ed clothes is growing daily. Superdry was set up in 2003. Julian Dunkerton, who owns SuperGroup, already owned a brand named Cult Clothing that sold vintage-looking, skater-ish clothing and logo T-shirts to students in cities such as Cheltenham, Oxford, Birmingham and Edinburgh. One of the labels that Cult stocked was Bench – a skater brand known for its hoodies and T-shirts. When Bench's founder and designer James Holder left, Dunkerton approached him and Superdry was born. Since then the label has consistently outperformed the competition. No one can sit with it. It added 18 UK stores last year, taking the total to 60 stores. A further 44 franchised stores were opened abroad last year alone, taking the total to 80. It is the label most likely to be worn by a papped celebrity carrying a Starbucks.

David Beckham, Justin Bieber, Helena Christensen, Kristen Stewart, Ben Stiller: celebrities all the way down the food chain to Cheryl's mate Derek Hough are willing to actually pay for it (a feat it itself in the celebrity world of "gifting"). Superdry is a modern sartorial phenomenon. And yet it still flies under the radar. The appeal of Superdry is hard to pinpoint, in some part owing to the broadness of its reach. It can't be put into a neat fashion category, as other high-street labels can. Zara fits into a box labelled "catwalk trends on the cheap" while Cos is "just the right side of plain for fashiony nerds". Superdry lives within a messy Venn diagram. It's sporty in a way that appeals to people who like the idea of snowboarding but who don't actually go; it's faux-vintage and authentic for those who don't like rifling through rails of secondhand clothes. It combines Americana with Japanese fonts, yet the company is based in Cheltenham. It is a downtime uniform of unisex basics but with design ticks.

It occupies the same territory as Abercrombie, Jack Wills, Gap, Uniqlo and AllSaints, and yet it trounces them. It's an easy formula to pick apart but it is hard to blend the ingredients. manchester orchestra hoodiesIf it were, its peers would surely emulate it stitch for stitch.manchester orchestra hoodies City financiers are equally flummoxed by the brand's success. sons of anarchy patriots hoodieAndrew Wade of Numis Securities told the Guardian earlier this week that "we can find no precedent for a UK brand successfully combining longevity with selling overtly branded fashion to the mass market". section 518 hoodie

But it hardly seems to matter how the label is pulling this fashion trick off. The fact remains that it is. Full disclosure: I used to be a bit sniffy about Superdry clothes – it comes with the job, and what of it? columbia hoodie omni heatThe brand didn't speak to me and it almost annoyed me, primarily because I don't like the fact that the styling is done for you. dbc hoodieOne popular piece looks like it's a checked lumberjack shirt layered over a grey marl hoodie. syiria hoodie meccaIt's one item but it is designed to look like two. Pre-combined clothes aren't what I like about fashion. But when I met Holder at the opening of a branch in the heart of the City last year (see, they are weekend clothes for city slickers) I changed my mind a little. He doesn't care for trends.

All he cares about is getting the best design possible out of each item of clothing. That means adding a few internal zips and pushing a leather jacket into a ready-made top-half ensemble and selling it for an affordable price. In short, he designs for people who like clothes but don't care about fashion with a capital F. And as the millions of men and women shopping and having pub lunches wearing Superdry up and down the country this weekend will prove, there is a really healthy appetite for that. For other uses, see Supergroup.For the Japanese beer, see Asahi Super Dry. SuperGroup plc is a British international branded clothing company, and owner of the Superdry label. Superdry products combine vintage Americana styling with Japanese inspired graphics. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. Cult Clothing Co was established by Ian Hibbs and Julian Dunkerton in Hereford in 1985, at which time it was trading as "Cult Clothing".

[3] It expanded during the 1990s and established stores in a number of UK university towns and cities, from Oxford and Cambridge to Edinburgh and Belfast. It opened its first store under the Superdry name in Covent Garden in London in 2004. Flag over the Regent Street Superdry Store in London Under Theo Karpathios, a nationwide then global expansion of Superdry took place, with stores opening in major towns and cities all over the UK, the majority in university cities. As of 2012 the brand was sold in over 40 countries across Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, Australia and Asia. The business floated on the London Stock Exchange in March 2010.[5] Dunkerton appeared in the Sunday Times Rich List 2010, and was estimated to be worth £180m. The company issued a profits warning and placed its store opening plans under review in February 2012; the share price quickly dropped by 18%. On 22 October 2014, it was announced that Dunkerton stepped down as CEO of Superdry and was replaced by Euan Sutherland, the ex-CEO of the The Co-operative Group.

In February 2016 Dunkerton sold four million shares at £12 per share (just under £50m), but remained the largest shareholder with a 27% stake in the group. Superdry does not overtly advertise and does not actively pursue celebrity endorsement, but a Brad leather jacket worn by football player David Beckham sold 70,000 from 2007 to mid-2009, becoming a best-seller for the company. The company's products include frequently meaningless excerpts of Japanese text, inspired by the common Japanese practice of placing decorative English text on items to increase their fashionability and appeal, a phenomenon known as Engrish. The company explained to a Japanese television crew in 2011 that they deliberately use simple machine translation to generate Japanese text, and that they are aware that the texts often have no meaning.[12] The Japanese text incorporated in the brand's logo—極度乾燥(しなさい) (kyokudo kansō (shinasai)?)—literally translates as "Extreme dry (Do it)", the text in brackets being due to the translation software used offering alternatives depending on whether dry is intended as a noun (e.g., super dryness) or an imperative, (e.g., dry this shirt out).