Behind the Scenes at Fab.com

Hi everyone.

We wanted to take a few minutes to give you a behind the scenes account of what we’re up to here at Fab.com. Our hope is that this sort of transparency will give you a little more insight into who we are, what we’re all about, how we think, and how we do things around here.

We’ve got this vision here at Fab.com that we can help people everywhere embrace great design. We believe that design is a lifestyle choice and that millions of people would benefit if we are able to make design more approachable and affordable. You can read more about our founding principles here.

So, we set out to build an online service that would enable people to discover design and purchase design objects at significant discounts.

We got started working on Fab.com on March 9, 2011. On that day we put up a splash page at Fab.com letting people know what Fab.com is going to be all about and enabling them to sign up.

Fab.com features daily design inspirations and sales at up to 70% off retail.

We then set out to accomplish 3 things over the next few months:

Build our team.
Launch our Inspiration Wall in April.
Launch our sales in May.

OUR TEAM.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been assembling a team of people with experience in design, consumer internet, and e-commerce. The Fab.com team now consists of:

The 20 person Internet development team that built socialmedian.
People with design industry experience in buying, merchandising, editorial, and operations from Design Within Reach, The Conran Shop, Blu Dot, Dwell Magazine, The New York Times, and Surface magazine.
E-commerce and online community experts with experience from ReachLocal, Dealon, Meetup, The Ladders and KickApps.
Veerle Pieters, internationally recognized visual designer. (Who also just happens to be the most followed Twitterer in Belgium!)

Our team is now 35 people and we’ll be expanding even more over the next few weeks and months.

THE FAB.COM INSPIRATION WALL.

We launched the Fab.com Inspiration Wall on Wednesday April 13th. Part mood board, part community design photo sharing site, the Fab.com Inspiration Wall is intended to serve 3 purposes:

We have had a pretty overwhelming number of people sign up for Fab.com before the launch of our sales (see chart below) and we wanted to give them something to do while waiting for the sales to start. We figured that browsing and adding design photos was a good place to start.
We wanted to put out something ahead of our sales that would show our users what our own style is like. Hopefully you can get a feel for that from the Inspiration Wall layout, minimalist design, and functionality.
Ultimately we hope to use the Inspiration Wall to compliment the design sales on our site. Considering buying an orange design object? Get inspired with orange and see how other people have incorporated such colors into their inspirations.

To be quite honest, this Inspiration Wall is a work in progress. We put out a first version of the Inspiration Wall rather quickly. While most of our development efforts are going towards getting the sales launched on Fab.com, we will continue improving the Inspiration Wall fairly rapidly based on user input and feedback. So, we need your help. What features do you think we should add next to the Inspiration Wall? Please answer this 1 question and we promise to act on it!

THE FAB.COM DESIGN SALES.

This is what we’re all waiting for, right?

Our team is hard at work building the sales website and signing up designers, retailers, and manufacturers (our “suppliers”) to offer their design objects on Fab.com. So far more than 50 design suppliers have agreed to run sales on Fab.com!

Our plan is to launch the sales in just a few weeks. Each day we’ll feature a number of designers with a wide range of products from categories such as furniture, lighting, workspace, table top, personal accessories, art & frames, and decorative accessories.

The Fab.com sales will each last for 3 days. The sales are “private” sales in that they are only open to Fab.com members. Membership is free but by invitation only.

You can request an invite here. Memberships will be approved based on Priority Access levels. Members with higher priority access levels will be allowed into the sales first. Our access levels also reward members with additional benefits such as cash credits and free shipping.

So far, 100,000 people have requested membership and thousands have achieved the various levels of priority access. Interest really spiked the past few days with the launch of the Inspiration Wall.