When Carol Kane co-founded Boohoo, an online fast-fashion firm, with Mahmud Kamani in 2006, “it was just me, Mahmud, a photographer and the model was Umar’s girlfriend at the time,” she says. Umar is a son of Mahmud, who later co-founded another successful web-based label, PrettyLittleThing, and sold most of it to Boohoo.
Speed is of the essence. Boohoo can design, manufacture and send out tiny batches – 300 pieces – of a particular design in two weeks, so it is extremely responsive to its customers. That compares with around six weeks at Inditex, owner of Zara, a Spanish giant whose trajectory Boohoo would like to match.
Boohoo Group PLC (LON:BOO) operates as an online fashion retailer in the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, the United States, and internationally. The company also provides its products under the boohoo, boohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, and Nasty Gal brand names.
