A year later the picture was almost unrecognisable. The much-hyped Boo won immortality in May with its spectacular collapse after burning through $135m (£90m) in less than 18 months, leaving e-tailing start-ups to struggle for every penny of investment. The story typified the frenzy surrounding internet start-ups last year. People were clamouring to get a piece of the next big idea, and Boo's young and charismatic founders, Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander, were among the few management teams with a track record on the internet, having already set up and sold Bokus, a Swedish online book retailer.

Their vision of a global leader in sportswear captured the imagination of dozens of sophisticated investors. That vision is now dead.

Invent your customer

A source at 21 Investimenti, the Benetton family vehicle which invested in Boo, says: "The Boo.com guys tried to invent their own type of consumer. What they learnt was that an online buyer is the same as the average store buyer."

An ex-Boo employee agrees: "I don't think they quite realised what they were creating. During the summer they thought of it as an internet company. By November they realised Boo was just a retailer, but the employees had no real retail experience."

Criticism has been levelled at the management for the catalogue of delays and cost overruns which culminated in investors pulling the plug in May as Boo continued to burn $1m a week.

In the space of a year, Mr Malmsten and Ms Leander were transformed from visionaries into a symbol of the worst excesses of the internet frenzy. Months later, the pair are still taking it all in. They have turned down job offers, preferring to relax and reflect in London and Sweden.

Mr Malmsten admits the management made mistakes, saying they were too ambitious and underestimated the time it would take to build the business. However, he remains confident about the development of the internet.

"I truly believe e-tailing is not over and can succeed, but I think the winners will be the bigger existing retailers with a well-executed internet strategy," he says. He thinks e-tailing is unlikely to take more than about 20 per cent of the market and will simply sit alongside the high street and catalogue channels.

On a personal level, the high-profile collapse does not appear to have terminally damaged Mr Malmsten's job prospects in a market that remains desperate for internet experience. He says he has had offers ranging from investment banks to established companies, and even new internet start-ups. He refuses to speculate on what the final decision might be, other than saying it is likely to be with Ms Leander, a childhood friend with whom he first joined forces in 1993 to launch a poetry festival in New York.

If the pair return to the internet arena, they will find a market changed beyond recognition. In the months following Boo's demise, business-to-consumer internet companies found it difficult to float in Europe, with dozens of IPOs being pulled or postponed. Many have also found venture capitalists more discerning in where they spend their money. Companies can no longer be "flipped" on to the stock market six months after launch, and may have to be funded all the way through to profitability in an intensely competitive retail environment.

"Boo was a dose of reality for e-tailers around Europe," says Nick Greenspan, co-founder of Bainlab, a UK-based internet accelerator. "It proved that internet companies cannot defy the business laws of gravity: costs over time have to be lower than revenues."

But Boo's collapse was more a symptom of the turn in sentiment towards the sector than a cause. Investors were already jittery about e-tailing stocks, and had begun to focus on B2B and net infrastructure companies. The slump in technology stocks, which was taking place at the same time, was one of the reasons that investors decided to pull the plug.

"The mindset [towards B2C internet companies] had already shifted," says Peter Bradshaw, head of internet research at Merrill Lynch. "But for those dithering on whether life had really changed, it helped them make up their minds."

Many of Boo's problems stemmed from its very ambition. It hoped to launch a state-of-the-art technology platform selling sportswear - which could be viewed on electronic mannequins from various angles - simultaneously in 18 countries. When the launch was delayed last year from May to November because of technical problems, money was thrown at it and costs spiralled out of control.

Impossible timescale

One ex-employee says: "In January to say you want to launch in May globally is a literally impossible timescale. After the delay, there was pressure to put in extra resources to launch as quickly as possible."

There was no finance director to control costs as the company rushed towards its launch. Dean Hawkins was appointed in February this year, but resigned after two months.

In addition, the inexperienced management team lacked the necessary advice from investors, even when things began to look bleak at the beginning of this year. Board meetings were regularly conducted with some members on mobile phones in airports around the world, and the fragmented shareholder base of 22 - with no lead investor - made radical decisions almost impossible.

By the end, investors such as Mr Arnault, who was considering a flotation for Europ@web, his internet investment vehicle, attempted to distance themselves from the debacle. One investor wrote off his stake months before the collapse, putting the investment down to experience. "Boo was a heck of a learning experience, but we had bigger fish to fry," he says.

Boo's 300 employees seem to have emerged relatively unscathed. They lost their jobs, and even missed out on their final three weeks salary, but there were few recriminations. Most enjoyed the experience and claim it stood them in good stead to move into other jobs. Having Boo on your CV is a sure sign you have been through the lessons of a start-up.

Inevitably, it is the venture capitalists who have the last word.

"It was a bunch of inexperienced people trying to run a multinational business," one says.

"If it hadn't had dotcom after its name, its ambitions would have been laughed at. On paper the management should not have been able to pull it off, and guess what, they couldn't."

RIP Boo.com.

Email Thorold Barker at thorold.baker@ft.com