"They tried to hit the moon and they were off by an inch, and when you're off by an inch on a moon shot, you miss the moon." That is how Ben Narasin, founder and president of Fashionmall.com, sums up the sad tale of Boo.com, the super-hip apparel web site that succeeded in garnering more publicity than paying customers.
But Narasin told attendees of the E-Tail 2000 conference in New York what he sees in Boo.com that justifies his company's recent purchase of the defunct site and his efforts to relaunch the site this fall. "Boo created a monstrous brand," he explains. "They will advance our efforts to build a brand in Europe by 18 months to two years."
Boo spent $225 million to achieve that brand acceptance, but its fulfillment problems led to perhaps the most well-publicized collapse of a dot-com retailer, one that for Wall Street, at least, called into question the strategic rationale of pure plays in e-retailing. Indeed, if there is a single theme running through the presentations at this year's E-Tail show it is that flashy marketing cannot overcome flaws in fundamental retailing operations. Yet, Narasin argues that toward the end of its brief run "Boo.1" was quickly learning the fulfillment side of the business. "Everyone thinks they failed because they didn't understand the importance of fulfillment, but that's wrong," he says. "They were fulfilling 98% of their orders on the same day, and their customers were very happy and loyal."
But the lessons on the importance of fulfillment were just being learned when the money ran out. "The founders of Boo.com assumed that the business would be well funded for a long, long time," says Kate Buggeln, the new president of Boo.com recruited by Narasin to resurrect the site. "Of all the risks they identified when they started, the one risk that was not seen was that the money might run out."
That is exactly what happened, of course, when Wall Street suddenly turned sour on the dot-com startups last spring, before Boo could fully get its act together. Buggeln plans to relaunch the site this fall by building on "the significant customer goodwill" that Boo's founders created. The new Boo site will preserve the old site's "in-your-face attitude: passionate, stylish, irreverent and unafraid," she says. "But our look will change."
That will mean much less focus on "technical sportswear" and a much broader assortment of casual lifestyle fashions. "When we relaunch, we want to make Boo.com the consummate portal to cool, the arbiter of taste and style, the trendsetter for what is the hippest and coolest," Buggeln says. But she recognizes that in its reincarnation, Boo must get everything right, from selecting the right style for its 18- to 30-year-old upscale American and European customer base to delivering world-class service and fulfillment. Says Buggeln: "We have to be dead on--and fast--or we'll be dead wrong."
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