Boohoo

Boohoo is a British online fashion retailer founded in Manchester in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane, two clothing suppliers who had spent years making garments for high street chains such as Primark and New Look. It sells cheap, fast-changing womenswear, menswear and accessories over the internet, and its range includes a large, constantly rotating stock of lingerie, nightwear and swimwear. The parent company, legally still Boohoo Group plc, has traded as Debenhams Group since March 2025.

From supplier to retailer

The founders' background explains the business model. Kamani and Kane knew how British high street fashion was made because they had made it, on contract, for other people's labels. Boohoo turned that knowledge inward. Instead of selling to a chain that would mark the clothes up, the company sold directly to shoppers online, cut small first runs, watched what sold and reordered fast.

That approach, usually called test-and-repeat, is the core of Boohoo's version of fast fashion. It favors short lead times and suppliers close to home, and for years much of its stock was sewn in British cities, Leicester in particular, rather than in Asia. It also means a vast catalog. Thousands of new lines can appear in a season, and most of them are gone before the next one.

Boohoo on the stock market

Boohoo floated on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market in March 2014, at a valuation of about £560 million. Growth through the late 2010s was fast, and by April 2017 the company was worth roughly £2 billion. The founders sold shares at the float, Kamani for about £135 million and Kane for about £25 million.

The listing paid for a run of acquisitions that changed Boohoo from one website into a group of brands.

The Boohoo Group buying spree, 2017 to 2021

Two deals in early 2017 set the pattern. In January the company bought a 66% stake in PrettyLittleThing, an online label started in 2012 by Kamani's sons Umar and Adam, for about £3.3 million. It bought the rest in 2020 for £324 million. In February 2017 it bought the American label Nasty Gal for about US$40 million, after Nasty Gal had gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Then came the high street. As British chains collapsed, Boohoo bought their names and websites but not their shops.

Date	Brands bought	Reported price
August 2019	Karen Millen and Coast	£18 million
June 2020	Oasis and Warehouse	£5.25 million
January 2021	Debenhams brand and online business	£55 million
February 2021	Burton, Wallis and Dorothy Perkins	£25.2 million

The Debenhams purchase was the most symbolic. A department store name that had stood on British high streets for generations became, overnight, an online marketplace inside a fast-fashion group.

The 2020 Leicester scandal

In 2020 reporting revealed that workers at a Leicester company making clothes for Boohoo were being paid about £3.50 an hour, less than half the UK minimum wage. The story hit at the height of the pandemic and centered on the city that had become the group's manufacturing base.

Boohoo commissioned an independent review led by the barrister Alison Levitt QC. Her report found the allegations "substantially true" and criticized the company's "weak corporate governance." The episode damaged the group's reputation with investors and customers alike, and it attached a lasting question to the test-and-repeat model: how cheap can a garment be when it is sewn in Britain at legal wages?

Lingerie and swim at Boohoo

Boohoo is no lingerie specialist, and its intimates range follows the same logic as the rest of the site. Bras, briefs, bodysuits and nightwear are sold at low prices in fast-turning styles, with the emphasis on trend over engineering. The bra offer leans toward push-up and bralette shapes and lace sets made to be seen. Swimwear is a large seasonal category, heavy on bikinis and one-piece suits in that year's colors and cuts.

Its real competition in that drawer is other online fast-fashion sellers, such as ASOS and Shein, rather than bra makers with fitting rooms.

Debenhams Group and the present

The company has spent the mid-2020s shrinking and reorganizing. Dan Finley became chief executive in November 2024, with Kamani as chairman. In March 2025 the group renamed itself Debenhams Group, though the legal entity kept the Boohoo Group plc name after shareholder resistance to a formal change. It now describes five core brands: boohoo, boohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen and Debenhams.

The numbers show how far the business has fallen from its peak. For the 2026 financial year the group reported revenue of £917.0 million and a net loss of £108.3 million. The boohoo website itself still sells the cheap lingerie and swim it always has, now as one label inside a group named after a department store it bought for a fraction of what it once was worth.

Last updated October 7, 2026