Smile, You’re Designed To
Simply put, this is the Fab mantra.
“Jason always says he runs Bradford’s company. Fab would not exist with just one of us. The left and right brain, the analytical and emotional decision maker, the skilled CEO and loud creative. We’re a perfect pair.” — Hypebeast Trade: Bradford Shane Shellhammer – Co-founder/Chief Creative Officer of Fab.com | Hypebeast
Fab to Launch Across Europe, Goldberg Says - Video - Bloomberg
“We have this concept at Fab called the ‘one thing,’ which is: Do one thing, and do that one thing better than anyone else” — Fab CEO Jason Goldberg On When To Go Big (He Should Know) | Fast Company
Fab today took a big step towards our mission of being the world’s most valuable design resource.
Fab has acquired Casacanda, the #1 flash sales website for design objects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Casacanda, based in Berlin Germany, relaunches today as Fab.de with 250,000 members, growing by 90,000 in the last 30 days alone. That brings Fab’s worldwide membership to more than 2.4 million members, all of whom have joined Fab or Casacanda in the last 8 months.
We’re thrilled to welcome Casacanda’s 45 team members to team Fab.
Here’s a little background on why we’re making this move.
In the U.S. we’ve seen massive growth, growing to more than 2 million members in just our first 8 months and selling nearly a million products during that time with ever-growing demand. Heck, we’ve added more than 700,000 members since January 1, 2012. We really do believe that this is nothing short of a movement; more than 1 million people have joined Fab in the U.S. from social sharing. That doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by making people smile. We make people smile and they pass it on. And, in the age of social media, they pass it along around the world with no borders.
Our ambition from the very beginning has been to establish Fab as the most valuable global resource for design. Good design is not just an American thing. It’s a global passion. Good design is made in every country, in every category and at every price point. We believe that people all over the globe benefit from having good design in their lives.
As early as October 2011 when we were just 5 months old, we began thinking and strategizing about which markets we would bring the Fab model to next. We quickly honed in on Germany, and Berlin in particular, as being the first major Fab center outside of the U.S. It’s a natural first-choice; the German economy is strong, Berlin is an awesome startup hub, and the German people have deep rooted passion for design and the types of products we sell on Fab. In fact, the stuff we sell every day on Fab drives a lot of inspiration from German design and many of the Fab products are very similar to what you might find in the boutiques and shops of German cities such as Cologne, Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin.
We did a study of the German market in October and November and went through a decision process of whether to build or acquire. In early December we took a trip to Berlin and met with a few potential partners to explore launching Fab in Germany. Of all the teams and people we met with in Berlin, we were far and away most impressed with the founders and team at Casacanda. We returned to Berlin in January and spent even more time with Casacanda to figure out if it was a good match. It was, and then some. Casacanda’s CEO, Roman Kirsch, is a true superstar. That guy is so impressive that I immediately wanted him on team Fab. Watch out for Roman. His future is boundless and he will do amazing things for Fab in Germany and well beyond for years to come. His partners, Sascha Weiler (technology) and Christian Tiessen (merchandising) are also impressive leaders in their domains. What struck us most is that they think like Fab, and they have Fab-sized ambitions to create the world’s #1 design resource. The more Bradford and I met with them the more we became convinced that the best way to launch Fab in Germany was with them.
And then, there’s also the results they have produced. As I noted, Casacanda has already grown to more than 250,000 members since launching in just September of 2011, growing by 90,000 in the last 30 days. They’ve also signed up an impressive roster of design partners on-par with Fab’s partners in the U.S. And, they’re delivering thousands of smiles to peoples homes throughout Germany, at a rate of 15,000 orders per month right now, growing by 200% month/month.
With this acquisition as the first springboard, we believe that Fab can generate at least 10 to 20% of our overall revenue from international this year.
With this acquisition Fab, today, now has nearly 200 team members worldwide. We’ve come a long way from 4 of us working out of my apartment at this time last year.
Here’s what this means for customers.
We’re already working together as one global team and we’re currently working with our design partners to sell globally. This includes bringing brands and products we’ve sold in the US to Germany and vice versa as well as sourcing global products to be sold both in the US and in Germany, and then in even more countries
In addition to leveraging scale on buying we’ll also be leveraging scale on logistics and technology and the Fab.de team will soon be on Fab’s entire technology platform which is known for its clean design, exceptional mobile apps and social sharing innovations.
All this means we’ll enable consumers to turn to Fab for more and more great design products, at the best prices, delivered rapidly, sourced from all over the globe.
Ultimately we plan to enable anyone anywhere to go to Fab.com and see an amazing selection of design products available to them, sourced globally, available locally. That’s our big vision.
We’re thrilled to be taking this giant step today.
Casacanda wird Teil von Fab. And we couldn’t be happier nor more excited about it.
Smile, you’re designed to.
Fab.com and the Fetish for Design
“When Jason Goldberg set out to raise a new round of funding for his flash sales site Fab.com, he dispensed with the usual PowerPoint presentations and instead gave potential investors a look at the crown jewels: the “dashboard” of real-time analytics that can instantly spot trends and enable the site to tweak its offerings on the fly.” — Venture capital sees big returns in big data | Reuters
“fab mobile visits are now 40% of all visits over the last 2 weeks, up from 33% in January.” — Fab Mobile.
Fab is growing fast. Crazy fast. 8 months ago we didn’t even exist. Today we’re at more than 2 million members and growing faster than ever.
We’ve got one big thing we’re trying to be the best in the world at: Fab.com is design. We believe that everyone, everywhere can benefit from good design.
Quite simply, we’re on a mission to make Fab the world’s most valuable design resource.
When we launched back on June 9, 2011, we really had no idea how far our model would extend. We had a hunch that good design existed everywhere, in all categories, and at all price points, but we really didn’t know what our members would take to.
Our model for picking products and categories is to find great stuff we love, throw it up on the site, and see what works.
Along the way we’ve learned a lot about what types of design objects Fab’s members are interested in seeing more of. We’ve learned this from monitoring our sales, analyzing the number of social media shares, studying the data, and through user surveys.
Based on that feedback Fab is launching 5 new vertical Weekly Specialty Shops in categories our members have asked to see much more of.
Fab’s weekly specialty shops sales start at 7pm ET / 4pm PT Monday thru Friday, and the sales last for 7 days.
The new Fab Weekly Shops are:
Each new weekly shop will feature several sales and hundreds of products. Here, for example, is what The Kids Shop launching Wednesday at 7pm ET / 4pm PT will look like:
Along with the launch of Weekly Shops, we’ve also released a major update to our email notification preferences so that Fab members can decide which shops they want to opt-in and out-of receiving emailers on:
This is all part of our broader strategy to make Fab the world’s #1 place for design.
With the addition of weekly shops, Fab will now have:
At the end of 2011 we had about 3000 unique products on Fab each day. Soon we’ll be well above 10,000. All while preserving the curation and stellar browsing and discovery experience Fab’s members have come to rely on us for.
Smile, you’re design to.
The Fab team is rolling out a big thank you gift today to our 2 million plus members:
Announcing Fab 2.0 for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Since launching our mobile apps this past October, we’re quickly learning about the power of mobile commerce.
Fab 2.0 for iPhone, iPad, and Android is a dramatic step in enhancing the way our members are able to browse and discover great designs. This is part of our bigger plan to grow from about 3000 unique sku’s on Fab at end of 2011 to tens of thousands by end of 2012.
Put simply, Fab will be the #1 way for people to discover great design.
New features in 2.0 include:
We think it will make you smile.
Sarah Lacy’s got a delicious scoop about what’s really driving the growth of Fab, gleaned over an inspiring (and delicious) lunch with me and Bradford this past Monday.
As Sarah notes, the real secret to Fab is that while we do keep track of sales and we do obsess over data when it comes to customer development, we don’t pick the products that go on Fab based on sales data. We choose what goes on Fab based on what we think is going to excite people and make them smile.
I had lunch with the co-founders Monday, and as they described their business I was struck by just how un-Valley the approach was. There’s no real brick-and-mortar analog for what they are building, and no quantifiable data set to determine the objects they pick. They simply look for beauty and color and style.
They drive the selection based more on emotion than data. They refused to make any decisions around what sold well for the first three months of the business, trusting their guts that if they love what they’re selecting, shoppers– or “readers”– will too. That isn’t an etailer. That’s Anna Wintour. “We needed to just let it develop,” says Goldberg. “We wanted people to look forward to opening the email and reading the site, no matter what they bought.”
Added Shellhammer, “We do what a good editor does. We take stuff and put it together in a way that creates something new.” They’re selling a lifestyle that cuts across categories.
Read more from Sarah’s thoughtful essay:
Fab Isn’t an Ecommerce Company; It’s a Content Company with Sales.
Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a dramatic shift in how people get to Fab.
Just 2 months ago — as recent as November 2011 — nearly 50% of Fab’s traffic came via our daily emails to our members.
Fab Visits November
In January 2012 we saw direct visits overtake email-driven visits for the first time.
We believe that the rise in direct traffic is because of 3 reasons:
Also notable is the rise of Pinterest as a traffic source for Fab. While still relatively small and accounting for .68% of all visits, Pinterest doubled as a percentage of visits in January and remarkably overtook Twitter links to claim the #7 spot.
@devfab, always rmbr 7am 2-2-12, locked out office, uploading Fab iPhone 2.0 to itunes from my laptop in hallway - ur 1st Fab ship it!
Back in December when Fab was nominated for a Crunchie in the Best Shopping App category, I said to Bradford:
“Wow, that’s cool. But we’re not going to win. We’re not really part of that whole Silicon Valley tech scene.”
Bradford retorted:
“Of course we’re going to win. We’ll win because we really did deliver the best, freshest, most exciting, and most innovative shopping experience in 2011. We’ll win because people know it. They’ve experienced it. It’s real.”
Duh. As usual, Bradford was right.
Congrats team Fab and thanks to all 2 million of Fab’s members. Last night Fab took home the Best Shopping App 2011 at the Crunchies, the premier annual tech awards.
We won by focusing on customers, delivering fun, and making people smile.
Hard to believe we’ve only just finished our 7 month of existence.
As we say at Fab, it’s just the beginning. We’re going to keep keeping it real and delivering value to users every day. And, as we do, expect a rapid pace of new features, benefits, products, and innovations from Fab over the next weeks and months.
Smile, you’re designed to.
Fab.com — the world’s leading design website — is actively recruiting for Chief Merchandising Officer for Fab Europe for our upcoming European launch.
Based in Berlin, the Chief Merchandising Officer for Fab Europe will be responsible for setting the design aesthetic and direction for Fab Europe. He/she will work closely with Fab’s Worldwide Chief Creative Officer to cultivate and develop relationships with design partners throughout Europe and around the globe to bring an exciting mix of design products to Fab’s members in Europe.
Get ready to hit the ground running. Fab launches in Europe real soon and we’re going to be running hard. You must be driven, ambitious, eager, and ready to lead.
Most of all, you need to have a point of view that is similar to that of Fab. We’re fun. We’re colorful. You be too.
