Boo.com

Boo.com
Company typeDutch NV
(Disestablished in 2000)
Industryretail
Founded17 March 1999; 25 years ago (1999-03-17)[1]
Defunct2000 (2000)
HeadquartersLondon, England
Key people
Ernst Malmsten
Kajsa Leander
Patrik Hedelin
Productsclothing, cosmetics
WebsiteBoo.com (Domain now owned by Hostelworld)

Boo.com was a short-lived British eCommerce business, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarded as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe by the investors because they had created an online bookstore named Bokus.com, the third largest book e-retailer (in 1997), before founding boo.com.[2][3]

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,[4] 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.[5]

Ernst Malmsten wrote about the experience in a book called Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, published in 2001.[4]

  1. ^ "Boo.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 5 August 2016.
  2. ^ Chaffey, Dave; Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona (2016). Digital Marketing Strategy, Implementation and Practice (sixth ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. p. 108. ISBN 978-1-292-07761-1.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Wray was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ a b Malmsten, Ernst (2001). Boo Hoo: A dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe. Random House Business Books. ISBN 978-0-7126-7239-9.
  5. ^ "The greatest defunct Web sites and dotcom disasters". CNET. 5 June 2008. Archived from the original on 26 February 2013. Retrieved 5 June 2008.