14
Sep

Fab & Quirky: A Case Study In Business Development At Startup Speed in 2012

It goes down like this.

  1. On Monday September 10, 2012, 3pm EST, Fab + Quirky sit down for the first time in several months to brainstorm product design ideas. 
     
  2. At the end of the meeting I turn to Ben Kaufman, Founder & CEO of Quirky, and ask him: “You guys doing anything for the iPhone 5 launch on Wednesday?”
     
  3. Ben: “Yes, we’re planning a 30 hour special Quirky event to solicit design ideas for accessories for the new iPhone.”
     
  4. Me: “Can we team up on this?”
     
  5. Tuesday September 11, 2012: Fab and Quirky get to work designing the collaboration to be announced the next day.
     
  6. Wednesday September 12, 2012, 3pm EST, Apple’s announcement event ends.
     
  7. Wednesday September 12, 2012, 3pm EST, Fab emails its 5 million U.S. members encouraging them submit and vote on iPhone 5 accessories design ideas on Quirky.


     
  8. Tonight, Thursday September 13, 7pm EST, the best design ideas will be chosen at a special Quirky Eval. 
     
  9. Friday September 14: After Quirky’s newest inventors have been selected, a real-time design workshop will begin, with Quirky designers and members collaborating round-the-clock to design and refine each invention pick into a final Quirky product.
     
  10. Saturday September 15: Ben Kaufman himself will fly the results (3D models, renders) of this design process to Quirky’s factories to get the manufacturing process kicked-off.
     
  11. Wednesday September 19, 3pm EST, just 7 days after the iPhone 5 was announced,  Fab launches a special sale featuring the newly design accessories.

 Smile, you’re designed to.

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About

Betashop is the website of Jason Goldberg,
Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Fab.

Jason founded Fab in 2011 with Bradford Shellhammer (Chief Design Officer) and Nishith Shah (Chief Technology Officer).

Fab is everyday design.

Fab’s mission is to help people better their lives with design. Millions of people around the world 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. Smile, you're designed to.

Some have called Fab "the fastest growing E-commerce company on the planet." We like to say we're just doing our best to serve up great design that makes people smile.

Fab now serves more than 11 million members across 26 countries. Fab grew sales by more than 500% in 2012, one-third of which comes from users of the Fab mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. In February 2013 Fab was named the #5 most innovative company in the World by Fast Company. Fab won the award for Best E-Commerce Company of The Year at The Crunchies in both 2012 and 2011. It's all very humbling and inspiring. The truth is we celebrate our challenges more than our successes at Fab and we're really still just getting started.

Fab is the fourth company Jason founded. Jason previously founded fabulis, socialmedian, and Jobster. In 2009, following the sale of socialmedian to XING AG, Jason was Chief Product Officer at XING, based in Hamburg, Germany. Before starting Jobster in 2004, Jason led product and business initiatives at both T-Mobile USA and AOL Time Warner. In a prior life, Jason spent 6 years working 100 hours a week for Bill Clinton in the White House.

Jason is also an investor in and Board Member at RJ Metrics. He is also an investor in BlackJet and Twitter. Notable prior investments: TweetDeck.

Jason is a product guy. He loves to blog, loves transparency, and loves trying to make people smile. Jason shares everything about Fab on his blog, betashop, at http://betashop.com.

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