Boo.com

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Boo.com
Dutch NV
(Disestablished in 2000)
Industry retail
Founded 1998
Defunct 2000
Headquarters London
Key people
 Ernst Malmsten
Kajsa Leander
Patrik Hedelin
Products clothing, cosmetics
Website Boo.com

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,[1] 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.[2]

Ernst Malmsten wrote about the experience in a book called Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, published in 2001.[1]

Headquarters and relaunch

The company had its headquarters along Carnaby Street in London in a building which it initially shared with the Erotic Review Magazine.[3] The company initially had 40 employees.[4] In October 1999, it had a total of eight offices and 400 employees[3] in Amsterdam, Munich, New York City, Paris, and Stockholm.[4] 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 product and Boo licensing."[5]

Reasons for failure

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Timing

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 cured 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 the first of numerous similar Dot-com company failures over the subsequent two years.[citation needed]

Problems with the user experience

The Boo.com Homepage as it appeared in May 2000.

The boo.com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target audience, going against many usability conventions.[6] The site relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash technology to display pseudo-3D views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar. The first publicly released version of the site included many large pages; the home page, for example, was several hundred kilobytes which meant that many users had to wait minutes for the site to load, as broadband technologies were not widely available at the time. The site's front page contained the warning, "this site is designed for 56K modems and above".

The complicated design required the site to be displayed in a fixed-size window, which limited the space available to display product information to the customer. Navigation techniques changed as the customer moved around the site. This was done to appeal to those who were visiting to see the website, but frustrated those who simply wanted to buy clothes.[citation needed]

The site's interface was complex and included a hierarchical system that required the user to answer four or five different questions before sometimes revealing that there were no products in stock in a particular sub-section. The same basic questions then had to be answered again until results were found.

Burn rate

Boo.com spent £125 million ($188 million) in just six months.[7] Boo.com's sales did not match expectations, due partly to a higher-than-expected rate of product returns (a service that was offered for free, but charged for by their logistics supplier Deutsche Post). Poor management and a lack of communication between departments resulted in rapid growth in costs. The effectiveness of an expensive ad campaign was limited because the website wasn't ready in time, resulting in curious visitors being greeted with a holding page.

Staff and contractors were recruited in large numbers, with a lack of direction and executive decision about how many people were required, resulting in high payroll costs.

Aftermath

The biggest loser among boo.com's investors was Omnia, a fund backed by members of Lebanon's wealthy Hariri family, which put nearly £20 million into the company.

Creditors, most of whom were advertising agencies, were owed around £12 million. Over 400 staff and contractors were made redundant in London and around the world, and many had not been paid for several months.

In a widely circulated article,[8] Tristan Louis blamed the management of the company for its failure.

Fashionmall.com, which had been operating since 1994, bought the remains of Boo.com which included brand, Web address and advertising materials but this deal did not include any physical assets, software or distribution channels.[7] The deal also included the Miss Boo character. Boo's main assets, its software and technology, were sold to Bright Station for $250,000. Boo.com had purchased this technology for $70 million.[9] Bright Station is a British company run by Internet entrepreneur Dan Wagner.

Less than $2 million was earned by selling all Boo's remaining assets.[10]

As late as 2003, stickers from their guerrilla marketing campaigns could still be seen in London, with the slogan "Fashion never dies!".[citation needed]

In 2005 CNET called Boo.com the sixth greatest dot-com flop.[11]

Current state of the domain

In May 2007 Web Reservations International (WRI) turned boo.com into a travel site with reviews and listings. When the new site launched, it already had more than one million user reviews which had been collected from existing WRI travel sites.[12]

In October 2010, the new boo.com site announced that it was closing down with effect from 1 November 2010.

As of January 2016 boo.com redirects to hostelworld.com.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wray, Richard. "Boo.com spent fast and died young but its legacy shaped internet retailing." The Guardian. 16 May 2005. Retrieved on 12 March 2012.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Sorkin, Andrew Ross. "INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS; Boo.com, Online Fashion Retailer, Goes Out of Business." The New York Times. 19 May 2000. Retrieved on 12 March 2012.
  5. ↑ Seckler, Valerie, "Boo Names New Boss: Kate Buggelin," WWD, Mon. 17 July 2000, p.14
  6. ↑ http://www.bohmann.dk/articles/usability_reviews/boo_com.html
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Boo.com Goes Bust
  9. ↑ INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS; Fashionmall.com Swoops In for the Boo.com Fire Sale - New York Times
  10. ↑ jobfairy.com - Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History
  11. ↑ Top 10 dot-com flops - CNET.comTemplate:Archive.org
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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