Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [96]
One thing, however, is for sure. There simply weren’t enough customers. Deterred by a problematic website which concentrated on fancy design rather than straightforward product information, few people were willing to make the effort in any of the 18 countries where boo had a presence. In the first month after its November launch boo managed to sell around US $200,000 worth of stock, from which it profited half. Not bad by most e-commerce site’s standards. But then, most e-commerce sites aren’t capable of spending around US $20 million in a single month (as boo did that November). Although sales figures slowly increased, they weren’t doing as quickly as boo had anticipated. Between February and April 2000, total sales were US $1.1 million. Unable to raise any more money from its investors, in May 2000 boo.com shut down and filed for bankruptcy.
In their final press release, one of the most famous statements of the dot.com era, Malmsten and Leander put their side of the story:
The senior management of boo.com has made strenuous efforts over the last few weeks to raise the additional funds that would have allowed the company to go forward with a clear plan. This plan involved a restructuring of the retail operations, the development of an e-fulfilment business using our unique advanced technology and operations platform, and the identification of strategic partners. It is disappointing to both the management and staff alike that we were not able to bring this plan to fruition against the background of steadily-improved trading.
The release concluded by stating: ‘We believe very strongly that in boo.com there is a formula for a successful business.’ Unfortunately, not everyone agreed. Among the many dissenters was Philip Kaplan, a 24-year-old New Yorker who launched FuckedCompany.com in 2000 to highlight what he referred to as the ‘ridiculousness’ of many dot.coms. The site quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, wanting to see which companies were next in line for the scrap-heap. When boo.com failed, Kaplan’s response was, to say the least, cynical and his site put a rhetorical question to its visitors. ‘Can you possibly think of anything that is a more eloquent testimony to having your head three feet up your Calvin-Klein-covered ass than to spend tens of million dollars on a dot.com start up AND NOT HAVE THE WEB SITE WORK?!’
There are others who take a kinder view though. Unlike the former staff at other doomed companies, many of the original boo team remain loyal to the memory and believe the company would have succeeded if only the investors had supplied more money.
It is also important to realize the wider context. When the news about boo’s demise hit the headlines, the European dot.com community remained reasonably confident. This case was viewed as an isolated event, related only to the incompetence and extravagance within boo itself. The reality, however, was that boo.com’s failure to survive was not unique. Only months after the front-page headline in The Financial Times ‘Boo.com collapses as investors refuse funds’, many others had suffered similar fates.
One of the journalists to have documented boo.com’s ill-fortune was the BBC’s internet correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. In his vivid account of dot.com Britain, Dot.bomb, he considers boo as part of a broader picture:
As other, less flamboyant companies also began to fail, it became clear that boo’s problem was one of timing. Its vision of online retailing had won the support of investors, but neither the consumers nor the suppliers were yet ready to adopt it in significant numbers. When the investors lost faith in that vision, plenty of