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About Dabs: Our history and growth

dabs.com is part of the Dabs Group of companies, originally  founded in 1987 by entrepreneur David Atherton in partnership with a writer called Bruce Smith (if you've ever wondered the name 'Dabs' comes from the combined initials of their two names). Together, Dave and Bruce launched the first 'Dabs' business - Dabs Press - 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 you know 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 overall customer experience through the exploitation of advancements in digital technology. The entrepreneurial approach of Dabs' 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 the Dabs Group and with effect from 28/04/06, dabs.com became a wholly owned subsidiary of British Telecommunications plc (BT). This change of ownership marked an exciting new phase in Dabs' history.

dabs.com has won many high profile awards over the years for both online retailing and general business performance including the "What Laptop!", "PC Pro" and "Computeractive" magazine awards for "Best Online Retailer". We also consistently receive the Hitwise Top 10 website award for being one of the most popular websites in the computing industry.

We are passionate about online retailing and as such are a senate member of the IMRG and are proud to display their 'Internet Shopping is Safe' and 'Internet delivery is safe' logos on our site.

Servicing the whole of the UK from our state-of-the-art premises in Bolton, Dabs processes thousands of customer orders every day from the millions of unique visitors that arrive at our websites each month.

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