Build Utopia in One Apollo Mission

“I was starting to wonder how we had ever believed we were only weeks away from launch. It was a mass delusion. We either hadn’t seen, or had simply closed our eyes to, all the warning signs. So who was to blame? Was it the technology companies for making promises they couldn’t deliver? Partly. Of course it would be easy to blame Steve Bennett, but when it finally came down to it, I realized with a sinking feeling, I had to take responsibility. As the CEO, my neck was on the line, anyway. I was the one that everyone would blame if the company didn’t launch. But I knew that they'd be right too. Instead of focusing singlemindedly on just getting the website up and running, I had tried to implement an immensely complex and ambitious vision in its entirety. Our online magazine, the rollout of overseas offices, the development of new product lines to sell on our site — these were all things that could have waited until the site was in operation. But I had wanted to build utopia instantly. It had taken eleven Apollo missions to land on the moon; I had wanted to do it all in one.”

“Perhaps inevitably as the public face of the company, Miss Boo quickly became the chief cause of concern. For the past few months she had been sporting a red ponytail and looked like a high school cheerleader, which wasn’t nearly good enough for the cool, urban image we had been trying to create. She seemed barely old enough to order milkshakes in the local diner let alone hang out in down- town bars. So the design team tried to make her more sophisticated by giving her different hair. But none of the styles they experimented with, from white dreads to black Afro, was quite right. The trouble was that she almost seemed to be trying too hard. As Kajsa put it, ‘She’s so cool, she’s really uncool.’ It was difficult to know what could be done. ‘Maybe she should change her hair all the time,’ Kajsa said, ‘like every three months. She’s such a fashion victim that she’s always on top of what’s going on.’ One way or another, it was clear that we needed some expert advice. So we booked the world’s top hair-stylist, Eugene Soulemain, whose clients included top Holly- wood actresses and fashion houses like Prada, Louis Vuitton and Hussein Chalayan. For a few weeks, while she waited for Eugene to fit her into his busy schedule, Miss Boo sat bald but beautiful in a quiet corner of Niclas’s Macintosh. But it wasn’t enough that she should just look cool. She had to talk cool too. A journalist called Lucy Ryder-Richardson wrote some lines for her, but the style-was thought to be too European when the point of Miss Boo was that she was the kind of girl who felt at home all over the world. So at the beginning of October we brought the New York style commentator Glenn O’Brien over to London for a couple of days to make her hip but transatlantic. Glenn had begun his career working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine and went on to be variously a comedian, poet, author and copywriter. Michael Skidmore had known him at Barneys, where Glenn had been creative director for advertising.”