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Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, Charles Drazin
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This is the story of how an international model and a former poetry critic from Sweden dreamed up the most ambitious and glamorous internet start–up ever attempted; how they convinced the world’s biggest fashion houses and Wall Street investment banks to invest $135 million into their plan; and, ultimately, how they burned through all the money in just over a year. The rise and fall of boo.com is an insider’s look at the 18 months of euphoria that ushered in the dot.com era.
- Sales Rank: #1613888 in Books
- Published on: 2002-06-01
- Released on: 2002-08-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.70" h x 1.00" w x 5.00" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 385 pages
Review
“Enthralling.” -- The Financial Times
“It seems like a tale from a different eon, but the lessons it teaches are timeless.” -- The Spectator
“readers … will be rooting for the company to survive, even though they know the story ends in disaster.” -- The Sunday Times
From the Publisher
This is the story of how an international model and a former poetry critic from Sweden dreamed up the most ambitious and glamorous internet start–up ever attempted; how they convinced the world’s biggest fashion houses and Wall Street investment banks to invest $135 million into their plan; and, ultimately, how they burned through all the money in just over a year. The rise and fall of boo.com is an insider’s look at the 18 months of euphoria that ushered in the dot.com era.
About the Author
Ernst Malmsten: born in Sweden and knew Kajsa in kindergarten. He met her again outside a Paris nightclub in 1992. The two of them made millions by selling their first internet venture, bokus.com, to Bertelsmann (bol.com). Kajsa Leander: also born in Sweden, and 'discovered' by the famous Elite modelling agency. She modelled for two years at all the major catwalk shows, and made all the covers of the top magazines including Elle and Vogue. Erik Portanger has been staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal for 18 months and has been a journalist for over 10 years. Before working for the WSJ, he was a senior correspondent for the AP Dow Jones News Service for 5 years.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Fast and Furious
By Lucas Boiteux
An excellent (although maybe too long) peek into one on the most interesting start-up failures in Europe to date. The book is well written, with a fast pace and a chronological course of events which make it easy for the reader to understand whats going on.
With the benefit of hindsight, its really intriguing how investors would pour more than $130 mm into a company with nothing but a business plan and a couple of co-founders. A sign of the times, I guess. Anyways, there are some valuable and timeless lessons for any entrepreneur.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
This book gives you two insights
By A. Jacob Stohler
The first insight is into how a dot com bubble project goes horribly wrong from day one, and the second is into the mind of a narcissist. Since Ernst Malmsten is both the founder of boo.com and the co-author of this book, you would expect trenchant analysis of the business and the frenzied Internet bubble of the time. But Malmsten has zero self-insight. He recounts facts and numbers and decision but never once reflects on the rightness or intelligence of those decisions. For example, he and his partner spent two days in New York picking out designer suits and having their pictures taken by top-of-the-line photographers at a crucial point in their company's development. His thoughts on the wisdom of this decision? None. It just happened.
Similarly, Malmsten is told by multiple photography experts that his beloved 3D imaging isn't a ready technology, but he does eventually finds a tiny L.A. company willing to do it for a huge amount of money. Most people might look back and say that this was a missed signal that the whole idea was a non-starter, but not the author. He pushes on as if there was no lesson to be learned.
This book would have been much more interesting if Malmsten had stepped back and let his co-authors Portanger and Drazin do an objective analysis, but unfortunately that's not what narcissists do.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck
By D. Harvey-George
Ernst Malmstein and Kajsa Leander are a pair of chancers from the small Swedish town of Lund. Hardly the best start for building one of the world's biggest Internet start-ups. Malmstein's square glasses give him a kind of Lit-Geek style (although somewhat worryingly his favorite poem seems to be Rudyard Kipling's If) whereas Leander, the Scandinavian ice-goddess with attitude, wan looks could vaguely be described as "Mongoloid Heroin Chic".
The dynamic duo seem to have a talent for spending other people's money, designer labels, name dropping and consuming hard liquor, Absolute with grapefruit, of course. Sometime in the mid-90s they were having some success in Sweden selling English books [...] The venture didn't appear to be very profitable but was at the right place at the right time. They were bought out by a larger outfit and managed to bank a few million. Smarter people would not confuse good luck with talent and would have quit while they were ahead.
However in MalmsteinLeander's case it gave them an appetite for the "vision thing" and entrepreneurship. Flush with success and with Leander having once modeled a few clothes for Beneton, they decide to build an online global sports and urban fashion outlet, the clothing equivalent of Amazon.
Boo Hoo is basically an excuse from Malmstein as to why this all went so wrong, as CEO he recognizes that he is responsible but as he explains over some 300 pages it wasn't his fault. In charge but not in control. For me the book is interesting, for the last ten years I have worked as a Dot.Comtechnical troubleshooter. I'd avoided working for Boo. Despite flying everywhere by Concorde and consuming obscene amounts of Absolute Vodka the founders were tight fisted with most of the staff, "Stock options are a concept we were not to keen about", writes Malmstein. He didn't see why he, as the visionary should be handing out bits of his company to mere code monkeys. In the end they agreed to parcel out a miserly 4.2% of the company. Not that this would have changed much, the vision was flawed from the start.
What Boo set out to do was build a global fashion retailer and launch it, online, in less than a year. In the heady days of Internet time where 1 year was supposed to equal 7 that may have seemed realistic but given the number of investors that passed at Boo in the initial rounds obviously a lot of people saw the risks. However there were enough investors who were taken in by the emperor's new clothes. To a certain extent it didn't matter if an idea was sound, what counted was launching, controlling the burn rate and getting to that all important IPO when the investment banks and vulture capitalists would cash in by suckering in private investors. Timing was everything. Even Malmstein seems to have realized this was the real deal, even if he did have allusions to running a multi-million dollar company.
Malmstein fails to identify what the Internet is good for. He sees it as a sort of glorified catalogue shop. A way of selling physical goods to a widespread audience. He is presented with the dangers, existing catalogue shops operate in the bargain end of the fashion market, pile high and sell cheap and suffer eye watering return rates. Some customers, Malmstein notes "order clothes in 5 sizes return the 4 that's don't fit". Expensive for a retailer.
Boo runs into resistance from the fashion houses. They like to control their brands closely and don't want discounting. However at the time (and this is still the case to some extent) Internet retailing was driven by discounting to build market. Malmstein hoped that Boo would be so hip that customers would pay a premium to shop there. He asks his technical team to construct a complex 3D website with a virtual assistant, Miss Boo, with digital hair styled by a top hair dresser. All this when the norm for a home Internet user was a 33.6kbps dial up connection. Still the site looks good when demoed on the LAN to potential investors.
Malmstein describes the typical Boo employee as not having much management experience but bright and energetic and most importantly "plugged in to youth culture". A bit like Malmstein thinks of himself one supposes. Not surprisingly this is not the best ingredient for building a site that will launch in 18 countries. The site is 6 months late and is dog slow. The Industry Standard complains that it takes 81 minutes to order a pair of shoes with no discount and a week's delivery It would have been quicker and cheaper to drive to the Mall. I remember the site as being as slow as molasses and nowhere near as much fun. What was really off-putting was that prices for sports gear were more than I would pay in the high-street where I at least would be able to look a clothes and try them on. A potential investor asks if Malmstein has bought clothes from his own store. Not a chance as Malmstein and a colleague head out to Westbourne Grove to buy a Paul Smith suit. "This is how you shop" comments a colleague. Just who is Boo for? The proles who can't afford to fly Concorde perhaps?
Investors come and go. Somewhat prophetically Larry Lenihan tells them "you are making extremely aggressive assumptions about visitor numbers to your site and you are going to blow way to much money getting there". At this meeting Boo can't even supply projections for "conversion rate, customer acquisition cost etc." Another investor, this time from Federated is also concerned about burn rate and sales figures and even Alexander Fuchs from their long suffering investment bank JP Morgan tells them that "the burn rate was not supported by revenues" saying this is their last chance to sort things out.
The financial crises, and dramatic cost cutting with the firing of 50% of Boo's staff two months after launching do nothing to improve investors confidence. They draw the obvious conclusion. Malmstein fires the CFO and third Amigo Patrik Hedelin who Trotsky like is rapidly airbrushed from Boo's history but even Rachel Yasue, a financial expert hired from KPMG at �1,750 per day fails to get a grip on the impending crisis.
Malmstein sees the light at the end of the tunnel, unaware that it is an express train about to steamroller him and his dreams. Without a hint of irony he discusses portfolios with his shoe shine boy at the SoHO grand without drawing the conclusion of JP Getty before the Wall Street Crash. Reading a puff piece in the Financial Times Malmstein says that "it was impossible not to succumb to momentary hubris" but such thoughts are rapidly dismissed from his mind as he quotes "exponential" figures for 50 days trading, yes conversion rates were up from a miserable 0.25% to an unimpressive 0.98%. That is 99.02% of visitors stopped by without buying anything but the new lightweight economy is about burn-rate, not profits, people who didn't see that just didn't get the vision. Only Boo's multi-country logistics system seems to have more to do with the old economy than new.
The end reads like the last days in the Berlin Bunker. Malmstein continues giving his orders of the day and developing new visions. At the same time the burn rate is around $ 2million per week with a typical day seeing just 400 orders worth $110 dollars. That's around $280,000 per week, the same as a single clothes store on Oxford St. We don't know what profit, or loss, Boo makes on each order but it is sure the figures are just not there, certainly not for the $135 million that Boo has burned through in the last 18 months. Malmstein seems incapable of such analysis, instead blaming various people, except himself, for the straits he finds himself in. Somehow he even manages to take time out to advise Tony Blair, the British prime minister, on eCommerce. Presumably how not to set-up such a venture.
Boo Hoo is an important piece of history documenting the madness of the Dot.Com bubble. As a book it suffers the usual "ghostwriter" syndrome of being over written. The boo crowd can't just go for a drink but Elle
McPherson has to brush past and the horns of the Absolute Vodka Bull have to bear down on Ernst like some portent. The book is horribly full of name dropping and references to the brands Malmstein buys and he comes over as a bit of a Nordic hick from the sticks impressed by the bright lights of
London.
Malmstein strives to make the reader believe that he could have been a contender, could have been somebody, instead of just some punk from Lund, but he doesn't really convince.
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