Boo.com burned $188 million in 18 months on a fashion site almost no one could load

Boo.com, founded in 1998, was an online fashion retailer that aimed to be a global luxury brand on the internet. Its founders raised about $188 million and spent it with extraordinary speed and style: offices in a dozen cities around the world, lavish launch parties, a large staff, and an expensive, cutting-edge website.

The website was its undoing. Boo.com's site was built with flashy graphics and required a fast internet connection and the latest software to load — but most customers in 1999 had slow dial-up connections and couldn't load it at all. The site was slow, complex and frustrating, and many would-be shoppers simply gave up. The company was spending a fortune to acquire customers who couldn't even use the product.

Boo.com burned through its $188 million in about eighteen months. With no revenue to match its spending and unable to raise more money as the dot-com bubble burst, it went bankrupt in May 2000 — one of the first and most spectacular dot-com busts. It became a byword for dot-com excess: a company that spent a fortune on everything except the one thing that mattered, a website its customers could actually use.