Superdry has paired with Manchester-based One iota to launch a mobile-optimised Facebook app as it heads into the busy Christmas trading season and mulls the potential of social commerce.

The UK fashion brand has appointed One iota to launch a Facebook application to promote the launch of its Autumn and Winter ranges with the mobile-optimised app offering one of Superdry’s 600,000 fans to win a year’s supply of T-shirts.

Superdry’s Facebook fans can nominate their friends via the app to enter the competition with One iota designing the app to integrate with the Social Open Graph to maximise viral activity by collating and processing consumer profile data in the process in a bid to go viral.

Carl Halford, a global social media manager for Supergroup, owner of the Superdry brand, told new media age it was vitally important that the Facebook app was designed to work properly on mobile as much of its audience was accessing the page on such devices.

“That was something we needed to tap into… we had to hit that market. From our point of view it’s one of the most popular ways for our Facebook fans to access [Superdry’s Facebook page]… As a brand we have to be positioned where the user is,” he said.

Damian Hanson, One iota’s CEO, went on to add that the agency has identified a way to render Superdry’s Facebook app properly on mobile given its history of developing mobile websites and it experience as a preferred Facebook developer. “To not cater for a mobile audience on Facebook is pretty much criminal,” he added.

Currently the fashion brand’s Facebook activity is geared towards raising brand awareness ahead of Christmas and driving traffic to Superdry’s own ecommerce site. However Halford did note that experiments with possible social commerce were on its radar.

“Presently we want to drive traffic to our website [via Facebook],” he said. “But we’re weighing up the pros and cons [of f-commerce]… it’s something that needs to satisfy the needs of the whole company.”

Hanson warned that brands must consider getting the “user experience right” before launching a Facebook store where all of their inventory is made available via the social network.

“It works with things like exclusive new ranges [of clothing for instance] or on sale items to reward fans for coming to the page,” he said.

”We’ve noticed that our Facebook fans keep coming to our page for the Facebook-only content [which they can’t access elsewhere],” added Halford noting that Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were the three-biggest social platforms for Superdry.

Earlier today the IMRG and Capgemini released data indicating that online clothing sales jumped 27% between August and September this year with £6.4bn spent online on all item classifications last month after a relatively slow summer which was attributed to multiple factors, chiefly the Olympics.

Tina Spooner, CIO at IMRG said, “This is the strongest quarterly growth recorded since Q2 last year and is perhaps an indicator that overall consumer confidence is increasing.”

She went on to note the continuing rise of shopping on smartphones, urging retailers to take advantage of the trend.

“Mobile commerce continued to soar in September, and the upward trend in the conversion of browsers to buyers is evidence that consumer behaviour is being transformed by mobile devices,” she said.

“Retailers that integrate the mobile platform as an essential part of their multichannel strategies will no doubt continue to reap the rewards over the lucrative festive shopping period.”