A Manchester-based online fashion group, founded in 2006, whose brands include boohoo, PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen, Coast, Oasis, Warehouse and Debenhams.
Boohoo is an online fashion group based in Manchester. It began as the single brand boohoo and has grown into a group of fashion names, including boohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal, Karen Millen, Coast, Oasis, Warehouse and the department-store name Debenhams, which is now the group's largest brand. In March 2025 the group announced a rebrand as Debenhams Group, although its legal name stayed Boohoo Group. This page covers the whole group and its UK operations.
Boohoo was founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane. Before that, the pair had supplied clothes to high-street chains such as Primark and New Look, so they knew how fast fashion is made and sold. Mr Kamani is the group's executive chairman and Ms Kane is an executive director. The group has added to its range of brands over time: Karen Millen and Coast were bought in 2019, Oasis and Warehouse in 2020, Debenhams in 2021, and Burton, Wallis and Dorothy Perkins in 2021. We did not find a mission statement or values page in the sources we read, so we have not invented one. The closest public statement is a sustainability plan that came with the 2025 rebrand.
Its headquarters is on Dale Street in Manchester. For about fifteen years its main distribution centre was in Burnley, Lancashire; the closure of that site was announced in August 2025 and completed in early 2026, with the work moving to Sheffield. The group says more than half of its garments are made in the UK, in places such as Leicester, London and Manchester. In 2026 the group had about 1,500 employees.
The group's story includes some difficult chapters, and it is worth knowing them. In 2017 and 2020, television and newspaper reports found that some Leicester factories supplying boohoo paid workers below the legal minimum wage. In 2020 the company accepted the findings of an independent review of its supply chain and appointed Sir Brian Leveson, a former judge, to provide ethical oversight. In 2023 the BBC's Panorama programme raised further questions about supplier pressure.
The group employs people across design and buying teams, who choose and develop the clothes, merchandisers, photographers and content creators, marketing and social media specialists, technology and data teams, and warehouse and logistics staff in northern England. It has recently been experimenting with artificial intelligence, announcing a partnership with PayPal for AI-driven shopping in February 2026. If you like fast-moving, online, trend-led retail, a group like this gives a broad view of how a modern fashion business works behind the scenes.
Website: www.boohooplc.com
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