First off, I was never even interested in boo.com and secondly, the fact that you can make money out of writing a book of your financial disasters amused me loads when I first saw it and I let the library shell out the £7.99 for this book. I wasn’t interested in boo because I’m both completely uninterested in the fashion brands it was pushing and I’m also the kind of person who responds to hype by ignoring it’s source. Also this book ends abruptly at the moment boo call in the liquidators so I have no idea whether Ernst Malmsten, one of boo’s co-founders was hoping that this book would be a money spinner.

Malmsten has two co-authors credited on the cover of this book but it’s all written in the first person and I came away from the book really disliking him. He’s frank about his dislikes and confrontations and fallings out with his staff and company co-founders and there are only a handful of people in the book who can be happy with the way Malmsten portrays them. He tries to be sympathetic and blame himself for mis-hirings and bad decisions but I never got thr feeling he was serious. Although he acknowledges that mistakes were made I don’t get the feeling that he really believes that anything was his fault and that he blames his investors for not funding him to infinity.

As a techie person the parts of the book that stand out for me are those concerned with the implementation of the boo website. It was intended to be a ground breaking piece of design and e-commerce and failed to deliver either. I can see that there is far more to running a retail site than software and that the boo team had to concentrate on logistics and suppliers (actually I was really surprised by the difficulty they had persuading old fashioned clothing suppliers to deal with them at all) but they seemed for the most part to expect a complex and innovative site to appear from almost nowhere.

I didn’t realise that boo had three founders, as well as Malmsten who took the CEO role in the company and Kajsa Leander who was mostly in charge of marketing and design I think there was a man called Patrik Hedelin who was brought in to handle finances but got pretty much squeezed out as the sums involved in those finances got too big for him to hamdle. My feeling is that the team really needed to contain a strong technical person and someone with a handle on the retail industry in order for boo to have got their ideas right before they burnt up a fortune.

I’m afraid I laughed out loud at finding that this page is all that remains of boo on the web today. Perhaps if they’d started off with a site this simple the company would still be here today.

It is quite a sad story since you know it’s going to end in disaster but it’s hard to find anyone to feel sad for. The founders always knew that it could end in tears, the senior management earnt enough and learnt enough that they are probably all doing very nicely for themselves by now and the investors all knew what kind of risk they were taking. I guess it’s the rank and file staff who were encouraged to think boo 24/7 that I feel the most sympathy for and I expect that they are still waiting for their paycheques.

Malmsten’s insistence upon creating a 24/7 fast living and hard drinking culture for boo was one of the things I liked least about the book. Having given up his private life in the name of entrepreneurship he seemed to believe everyone around him should do the same to further his vision. I think that annoyed me even more than his constant whinging that everything would be ok if the investors would just pony up another measley $20 million.

In summary, it’s an interesting and compelling book but I wouldn’t class it under enjoyable. It’s more like rubbernecking to see the accident on the other carriageway.