19
Jul
Jul
Fab Just Raised $105 Million of New Financing to Help People Better Their Lives With Design
In February 2011 Bradford Shellhammer and I shut down our fledgling social network to start a new business around our common passion: Design. Together with Deepa and Nishith Shah and Veerle Pieters, we set out to build the world’s most compelling marketplace for everyday design.
From the beginning, the Fab formula has been to combine the best designed website and apps, featuring the world’s most exciting product designers, backed by best-in-class operations, supply-chain, and customer service — all designed to make people smile by delivering everyday design inspirations across every product category at great prices. We also dared to question the way e-commerce is done. We’re fun. We’re quirky. We’re colorful. We’re modern. We’re social. We’re mobile. We’re rethinking e-commerce from the ground up.
Fab launched to the public in June 2011 and one year later the enthusiasm of our members has miraculously propelled Fab to be one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies on the planet. Fab’s more than 5 million members have purchased 3.4 products per minute from more than 5,000 designers and Fab now delivers smiles to people in more than 20 countries.
[video]
[infographic]
Along the way, our Fab team has grown to consist of 400 of the most passionate design lovers in the world, with offices in Berlin, Deinze, London, New York and Pune. Of all the things that we have accomplished in our first year, building this incredible team and watching them embrace the Fab mission and make it their own has been most rewarding.
Fab’s mission is to help people better their lives with design.
People use Fab to discover everyday design products at great prices, to connect with the world’s most exciting designers, and to share their favorite design inspirations.
And, yet, we’re just getting started.
We know that we’re only as good as our most recent order. We have to earn it each day and challenge ourselves to do better and better. We’re off to a pretty good start, but it’s a long road ahead. This is still just the beginning of the Fab story.
Today marks a major milestone in our journey.
I’m thrilled to announce that Fab has closed $105 million in new “Series C” financing.
The new round of financing was led by Atomico. Atomico is an international technology investment firm focused on helping the world’s most disruptive technology companies reach their full potential on a global scale. Atomico was founded by Niklas Zennström, the co-founder of Skype. I first met Niklas and his partner, Geoff Prentice, back in March of this year. I was immediately struck with their long term view of our business and their perspective on the potential for the Fab brand. Through our discussions it became clear that Niklas, Geoff, and the entire Atomico team shared our vision for Fab. We believe that we have a special opportunity to create one of the world’s next great brands. We believe that Fab can become the definitive global brand synonymous with design. We also know that it will take a steady focus on making our customers smile. It’s not a leap to compare Fab with Skype itself, and with another Atomico investment, Rovio — the makers of Angry Birds. Like Skype and Rovio, Fab is focused on developing and nurturing our long term brand relationship with our customers. We’re building a franchise based on a consistent, thoughtful experience that puts customers first, not profits. We’re focused more on ensuring the long term success of that franchise than we are with near term gains. We’re in this for the long haul. Atomico is the perfect partner to help us grow.
Atomico is already helping us with our global expansion through their impressive footprint in London, Tokyo, Beijing, São Paulo and Istanbul.
Geoff Prentice from Atomico will be joining Fab’s Board of Directors. Welcome Geoff!
Also joining the round are: Andreessen Horowitz (who led our Series B round), Menlo Ventures (who led our Series A round), First Round Capital (who led our Seed round), David Bohnett’s Baroda Ventures (who has participated in every round of Fab financing, ru-Net Technology Partners (RTP), Pinnacle Ventures, Docomo Capital, Mayfield Fund, and Troy Carter.
So, you’re probably asking yourself: What the heck is Fab going to do with $105 million?
Here’s just some of what we’ve got planned:
- We’re gonna keep doing what we’re already doing: Focus each day on making our customers smile. We really do believe that if we focus first and foremost on making people smile, lots of money and opportunity will fall out over time. This extends to the technology we develop, the products we sell, and the operations and supply chain we put behind it. It’s all about making people smile. We don’t choose products to sell on Fab based on revenue and margins, we just focus on the Fab smile quotient: The ratio of shares and wows to views. That drives our business.
- One of the things we’re working the hardest on is speeding up our ship times. We know all too well that the last thing you want to do is wait more than a couple of days for your next great design find to reach your home or workplace. That’s why we’re literally investing millions of dollars into building Fab warehouses and taking Fab inventory, all towards averaging just a few days on all non-custom orders by end of this year. You will start to see dramatic improvements month-by-month the rest of this year as we work towards this, and by the holidays we are going to enable hundreds of thousands of the world’s best designs to ship out lightening fast. We’re committed to getting this right.
- We’ll be dramatically increasing the number of products available on Fab each day. We’ve already been making great progress on that this year, going from 2500 unique products on Fab at the end of 2011 to nearly 10,000 per day now. We’ve got even bigger plans to have tens of thousands of products on Fab in the near future, all easily discoverable and fun to find. We want people to be able to turn to Fab for any design need, be it a sofa, chair, lamp, bed sheet, flatware, poster, a pizza T-Shirt or a jellyfish aquarium, or whatever makes you smile.
- We’ll be investing even more in our core differentiators, including: Developing all of our own Technology, launching new innovations in Social and Mobile, growing our Designer Network of more than 5000 designers, bringing even more unique and exclusive products onto Fab, and furthering our Supply Chain expertise and capabilities. We’ve got a number of major projects underway that will position Fab even more as the leading innovator in e-commerce.
- We’ll continue expanding our global footprint. We anticipate that 20% of Fab’s revenue in 2012 will come from outside the U.S. Today we’re selling in the U.S., Canada, and 18 EU countries. In 2013 we’ll be venturing into additional markets. And, by 2014 we expect more than half of our revenue to come from outside the U.S.
As we raise this enormous amount of money, we do it humbly. We’re just lucky and fortunate to be able to get up each day and do what we love and help people smile and laugh through design. It’s an amazing opportunity and a ton of responsibility that we take very seriously.
Smile, you’re designed to.
Jason & The Fab Team
19 Notes
-
gifts-for--men likes this
-
matrix2012v reblogged this from betashop
-
recraftworkshop likes this
-
shonzilla likes this
-
hye0910 likes this
-
yvonnelimjy reblogged this from betashop
-
hidhidic likes this
-
michpalmer likes this
-
ajoyner likes this
-
fab reblogged this from betashop
-
youngbradford reblogged this from betashop
-
startup-ecosystem likes this
-
palbi likes this
-
rstevens likes this
-
susanmernit reblogged this from betashop and added:
BIG CONGRATS, Jason!
-
come2myhead likes this
-
bethferreira likes this
-
seanrrwilkins likes this
-
john likes this
-
tradepal likes this
-
betashop posted this
Comments
blog comments powered by Disqus