Boo.com
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Dutch NV (Disestablished in 2000) |
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| Industry | retail |
| Founded | March 17, 1999 |
| Defunct | 2000 |
| Headquarters | London, England, U.K. |
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Key people
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Ernst Malmsten Kajsa Leander Patrik Hedelin |
| Products | clothing, cosmetics |
| Website | Boo.com (Domain Now owned by Hostelworld) |
Boo.com was a British Internet company, founded by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, which went out of business following the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
After several highly publicized delays, Boo.com launched in the autumn of 1999 selling branded fashion apparel over the Internet. The company spent $135 million of venture capital in just 18 months, and it was placed into receivership on 18 May 2000 and liquidated.
In June 2008, CNET hailed Boo.com as one of the greatest dot-com busts in history.
Ernst Malmsten wrote about the experience in a book called Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, published in 2001.
The company had its headquarters along Carnaby Street in London in a building which it initially shared with the Erotic Review Magazine. The company initially had 40 employees. In October 1999, it had a total of eight offices and 400 employees in Amsterdam, Munich, New York City, Paris, and . It relaunched in fall 2000 with Kate Buggeln, an ex-Bloomingdale's salesperson and Internet consultant, appointed as president. She told Women's Wear Daily that they were working to "expand beyond the portal business model into Boo products and Boo licensing."
Although there were several months of delays prior to launch and problems with the user experience when boo.com first launched, these had been largely fixed by the time the company entered receivership. Indeed, sales had grown rapidly and were around $500,000 for the fortnight prior to the site being shut down.
The fundamental problem was that the company was following an extremely aggressive growth plan, launching simultaneously in multiple European countries. This plan was founded on the assumption of the ready availability of venture capital money to see the company through the first few years of trading until sales caught up with operating expenses. Such capital ceased to be available for all practical purposes in the second quarter of 2000 following dramatic falls in the NASDAQ presaging the "dot crash" following the Dot-com bubble. Boo was only one of numerous similar Dot-com company failures over the subsequent two years.
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Wikipedia