George Parker: the Boo Dot Com Boom…
If, like me, you are well into your old geezerdom, you will surely remember the dot-com implosion of the late nineties. A time when numerous BDA’s blew millions pitching inane Web based businesses that flogged everything from doggie toenail polish to personalized nose hair removers. I’ll never forget the morning I stepped out of the elevator at J. Walter Thompson, New York, where I was permalancing, to be greeted by a group of senior agency management all wearing 18th century outfits as they awaited a potential client who was a Web purveyor of replica antique powdered wigs. Actually, I may have made up the powdered wig bit, but it was definitely something as dumbfuck as that! JWT won the account, but suffice it to say that within months, the client went bust, the agency was left with massive unpaid bills, and the execs had to find other means of paying for their Hampton’s summer rentals.
Perhaps the most famous example of how ridiculous many of these startups were, was the aptly named, Boo.com, a company formed in Britain to sell high-end, branded fashion wear. The Swedish founders, Ernst Malmsten, a former professor of Norse literature, and Kajsa Leander, a retired fashion model, didn’t have a clue about commerce, let alone the Internet, yet this didn’t stop investors from pumping hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds and Euros into the venture. The basic principle of the site was that you would log on and then proceed to wander through multiple pages of semi-3D views of all the fashion merchandise available, accompanied by your very own personal avatar-shopping assistant, “Miss Boo.”
Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the technology at the time and the over ambitious design of the site, you would grow old and unfashionably fat and ugly waiting for pages to load via your slow dial-up connection. As a result, even though the Boo.com brand received tons of favorable PR and press coverage, potential customers quickly became frustrated and refused to stick around for the hours it took to choose the latest gear from Gucci, Versace, or Louis Vuiton. Consequently, Boo.com rapidly burned through millions of venture capital dollars as they opened plush offices in London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, and whatever other exotic locations the founders took a fancy to. No surprise that Boo.com became known in the dot com business as the enterprise that ran on “the three C’s”: Champagne, Caviar, and Concorde – there were also many rumors of a fourth “C,” namely cocaine! After a few short, exotic months and several hundred million dollars worth of funding, Boo.com was out of business. The company name and the Miss Boo character (two of their few remaining assets) were sold for a mere two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It does however, retain one claim to fame… It is currently listed as the sixth largest dot com fuck up of all time.
