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About Dabs: Our history and growth
A wholly owned subsidiary of British Telecommunications plc (BT), dabs.com is one of the UK's leading internet retailers of IT and technology products, offering over 15,000 products from the world's leading manufacturers such as Sony, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba and Microsoft, to over 1.6 million registered customers across the country.
dabs.com’s mission is:
to provide customers with a quick and easy way of buying the products they want, at the most competitive prices around, delivered directly to their door.
dabs.com’s history:
dabs.com was previously owned by entrepreneur David Atherton who founded his first business, Dabs Press in 1987. In partnership with a writer called Bruce Smith (the name 'Dabs' comes from the combined initials of their two names), Dabs Press was a publisher of technology books specialising in practical 'how to' guides for the computing marketplace. Although David and Bruce remained firm friends, they went their separate ways in 1990, from which time Dabs was 100% owned by David.
A natural progression from writing and publishing books about technology, was to start selling technology products and it wasn't long before Dabs Direct was established. Launched in 1990, Dabs Direct was the offline mail order predecessor to the website-based online business dabs.com as you know it today.
Since Dabs' IT and Technology sales business was founded in 1990, the company’s vision has evolved significantly in line with a drive to increase efficiency and improve the customer’s overall online shopping experience through the exploitation of advancements in digital technology. The entrepreneurial approach of dabs.com’s management team was perhaps best leveraged during the period in which the company was steered from the traditional call centre-based mail order business Dabs Direct, to the e-business that is dabs.com today.
In April 2006, David sold dabs.com and with effect from 28/04/06, the dabs.com business became a wholly owned subsidiary of British Telecommunications plc (BT).
 | dabs.com has become one of the UK’s finest dot com success stories. Servicing the whole of the UK from our state-of-the-art premises in Bolton, Dabs typically processes well in excess of 5,000 customer orders every day from the millions of unique visitors that visit dabs.com each month. |
dabs.com has won many high profile awards for both online retailing and general business performance including the recent 2005 "What Laptop!" award for "Best Online Retailer".