It is that rarest of treasures - a warm, cloudless day in England and a bank holiday to boot. By all expectations, few Londoners should be at work. In the offices of Boo.com, however, there's always work to be done, and dozens of staffers are testing the servers for next week's launch, putting the final touches on the op-art site design, setting up a temporary desk for the company's CFO. As if the sunny holiday weren't distraction enough, there's the drilling, the torn-up floors and the desks that keep rolling around to elude the nonstop construction.

And there's the music: a loud heavy-metal soundtrack that pours through open windows from Carnaby Street, still a tourist magnet for young clothing mavens and scene-seekers. Mod and hippie styles drove the first incarnation of Carnaby Street, but the Internet is driving Boo.com's attempted renaissance. It hardly matters that no one here is old enough to remember the '60s heyday of Carnaby Street. All they need is the Austin Powers send-up to know that Boo.com had better be groovy, baby. And the goal appears to be just that - to make Boo.com hipper and more exciting than the sporty clothes it peddles.

Coordinating all this chaos are two 28-year-old Swedes who are not afraid to admit that they don't know much about the Internet. True, they founded an Internet company, but they sold it in less than a year. (They didn't even have a balance sheet to show the acquiring company.) Spend any time with the duo and you quickly learn that they're just as excited by earlier accomplishments. Chief marketing officer Kajsa Leander looks fondly back on her days modeling for the Elite agency and running a small Swedish publishing house; CEO Ernst Malmsten seems proudest of the Nordic Poetry Festival the pair organized in New York City in 1993.

Make no mistake, however: This is a deadly serious e-commerce company. It has assembled an impressive group of financial backers led by J.P. Morgan, the venerated investment bank that had never put money into an e-commerce startup company until Boo.com. In its most recent round, it added a multimillion-dollar investment from Bain Capital (dossier) in Boston. Boo.com is sinking tens of millions of dollars into building and supplying its site, and will back it up with generous ad and marketing campaigns launched over the next several months. Some of the biggest names in fashion, from Louis Vuitton to Benetton, are backing the venture. And Boo has secured online sales authorizations from big names like Fred Perry, Donna Karan and the North Face. It has hired staff with stunning pedigrees from companies as varied as Barneys (dossier), Virgin and the Boston Consulting Group. As the buzz envelops the project, the Boo.com Web site is getting some 60,000 hits a day - even though there's really nothing on it.

What makes boo.com so compelling? After all, it is entering a space - retail apparel - that has so far stubbornly resisted the Web. Luke Alvarez, Boo's global business-development director, says the group will have a "killer Web site" on top of a "global business model," which will lead to "first-mover advantage."

Of course, everybody says that.

But hear Boo out. Its goal, as Leander says, is to build a place where "you can use the Internet to fulfill your fantasies." That's assuming that your fantasy involves buying casual and athletic apparel. Boo.com's design will resemble the ultimate catalog: Clothes rotate so you can see what a jacket looks like from the back; there are virtual mannequins you can paste the clothes on; you can search by brand, by type of clothing or even by activity, such as basketball or rock-climbing.

Then there's distribution. At a time when customers are beginning to question the shipping charges at places like Amazon.com (AMZN), Boo.com says it will ship anywhere in North America and Europe free. It will guarantee five-day delivery, working with