Boo.com

» see boo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

boo.com launched on 3 november 1999. the founders were ernst malmsten and kajsa leander, two swedes who had previously built and sold an online bookstore called bokus. the third co-founder was patrik hedelin from credit suisse, brought in to manage finance. the pitch was sportswear and streetwear sold globally through a single site that supported eighteen currencies and seven languages from day one. the demo featured miss boo, a 3d virtual model who rotated to show garments and offered styling tips, on a site that ran in flash and required heavy javascript at a moment when 56k dial-up was the standard home connection.

between 1998 and the launch, boo raised $135 million from jp morgan, benetton family money, bernard arnault's lvmh, and a handful of smaller investors. the money went to staff (350 employees across stockholm, london, new york, paris, munich, amsterdam, plus other offices) and to engineering on the 3d storefront, with $25 million spent on pre-launch marketing before any product was sold. the launch slipped from spring 1999 to autumn 1999. it slipped twice more. when the site finally went live in november, the homepage weighed several hundred kilobytes and took minutes to load on the connections most users had at home.

the site barely worked. mac users could not use it at all. customers who did manage to load it complained about navigation, about the 3d model rendering slowly, about returns. the company shipped roughly $1.1 million in revenue in its first quarter against an operating cost above $5 million per month. the spring 2000 nasdaq crash closed the venture funding pipeline that boo had assumed would top up the burn rate. on 18 may 2000 boo.com filed for receivership in the uk, six months after launch, and kpmg liquidated the assets over the following weeks. the technology was acquired by bright station for $250,000.

i was fifteen when boo.com died. i had a 33.6k modem at home in turkey, ttnet would not arrive for years, and a 3d fashion site was not loadable on my connection even if i had heard of it. i learned about boo from later post-mortems, the way most people my age learned about it: as a single-name story that came up whenever anyone wrote about the dot-com bust. the failure was so big that the company became more famous in death than it ever was alive.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

boo wanted to sell fashion globally from a single web destination. the site supported eighteen currencies and seven languages at launch, plus localized warehouses in eight countries to handle returns. the catalog was sportswear and streetwear, with north face and paul smith leading a roster of dozens of similar brands. the site's showpiece was miss boo, a rotatable 3d avatar that displayed garments on a virtual body. miss boo was supposed to make online clothing shopping feel like browsing a high-street store. on real-world hardware she felt like watching a slideshow with extra frames.

the global ambition was the part that drained the budget. running offices in eight countries before any revenue meant carrying a payroll most pre-revenue startups would have collapsed under. the "spend now, scale up before competitors" theory worked at amazon and was assumed to work everywhere. for a fashion retailer with a hard-to-load homepage and a delayed launch, it did not.

~ why it died ~

the immediate cause was the april 2000 nasdaq crash, which closed the late-stage venture market that boo's planned next round depended on. without the next round, boo had four to six weeks of runway against monthly losses of more than $5 million. the founders flew to investors trying to raise emergency money. they could not. on 18 may receivers walked in and the brand was over.

the deeper cause was the product. boo's site simply did not work on 1999 home connections at the volume of the audience it was selling to. that is the kind of mistake a 350-person company should have caught in a usability test before spending $25 million on launch marketing. the founders had also never run a fashion retailer before, and the operations side (warehousing and fulfillment across eight countries, plus a returns process) was being built simultaneously with the website. when something failed it usually failed in two places at once.

~ what it left ~

the founding story of how to write about dot-com excess. boo gets cited in every history of the bubble, alongside pets.com and webvan, as the company that raised too much money and shipped a product nobody could actually use. ernst malmsten and kajsa leander wrote a memoir, "boo hoo," in 2001 that is now itself a primary source on the era. there is a film adaptation in development on and off for years.

the more useful inheritance is operational. boo proved that having $135 million does not buy you the right to ship late and slow at the same time. amazon survived the same period because amazon shipped books that worked over slow connections to a small set of countries and only globalized later. boo tried to do amazon's eventual end-state at launch, and the gap between ambition and execution was the gap that swallowed the money.

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