Fab Blasts Through The Commerce-Media Divide With Five New Verticals

Commerce used to be separate from content. Now sites like Fab are combining the two--and creating addictive new experiences.

Since June of last year, Fab has been the go-to flash-sale site for ogling beautiful, design-y pieces. Today, the New York-based company is announcing that it is launching five independent verticals--or "shops"--for items related to fashion, food, children, pets, and vintage.

The launch comes just weeks after the company hit the 2 million users mark--and it hit that milestone long before its first birthday. The company added 450,000 users in January alone and has doubled its membership since November. And now, CEO Jason Goldberg tells Fast Company, the company is on track to do $100 million in sales this year--double the annualized take from last year.

Fab's roaring success, like that of similar ventures like One King's Lane, underlines how the next wave of e-commerce isn't simply about executing well on a retail idea. Rather, with its gorgeous photos and sensuous content, Fab is leading the way in merging commerce with content--and showing that successful stores in this space will realize that they need to feed customers' desire to browse and consume media, as much as their interest in shopping.

"We want to look like a glossy magazine," Goldberg says.

Like Fab proper, each of the new "shops" will offer items for sale during limited windows--in the case of the verticals, seven days. Unlike Fab proper, the shops will roll out only weekly, rather than daily: Vintage on Mondays, Fashion on Tuesdays, Kids on Wednesdays, Pets on Thursdays, and Food on Fridays. Each "shop" will go live at 7 p.m. Eastern time, starting this Thursday.

Goldberg says their customers' appetites for these particular categories demanded specialized treatment. "We were already selling fashion, and we were already selling kids and pets," Goldberg says. "But we felt like to do them justice, it would be better to have a dozen of the same sales on a given day, so that, for example, t...

[Source: Fast Company]