What's Up With BOO.COM?

I recall reading that Boo.com was one of the first “dot-bombs”-it was started by a swedish entrepreneur, and lost its total investment within a few months-then it came back, now it is shut down, but will reopen. Anybody know what kind of crap they plan on selling? I always thought the website name was ludicrous-what the hell were they thinking? :smiley:

The word “BOO” is designed to get your attention.
:stuck_out_tongue:
next question?

I don’t get it. What’s inflammatory about boo.com? Is there some racial slur I’m not aware of hidden in the URL?

Wikipedia says among other things,

To give a little history, Boo.com was a European dotcom that was started in 1999 and was supposed to offer online clothing sales. They had something like $120 million in venture capital funding and blew it in less than a year, by overpaying employees and contractors, and lavish spending on five-star hotels and first-class airline tickets. The extent of the overspending was unusual even for the time, so it was a notorious story.

Aha. Thanks for the background, Dewey Finn.

Amazing how screwing up bad enough will make you just as famous as succeeding.

Sounds vaguely familiar.

Did boo.com actually SELL anything? Or was it just a scam to fleece investors? :confused:

They made a little money; I found articles that said its revenues during the last fiscal year was under $1 million, so not nearly enough. Apparently they offered free shipping on returns, which cost them a lot of money (among many poor decisions they made).

I don’t think the company set out to fleece investors; instead I think it was just really poorly managed, like so many of the other dotcoms back then. The venture capitalists were awfully loose with investment money back then, so I wondered why no one tried to simply walk away with $10 or $20 million in VC money instead of wasting it on building a company that was sure to fail. At least the money might have lasted longer that way.