Germany’s notorious clone merchants have sold their stake in furniture operation Fashion For Home, but that still leaves them with good alternatives in the space. Whether they can produce strong players in less traditional e-commerce markets is another question.
Just months after Germany’s notorious Samwer brothers courted controversy by cloning design sales site Fab.com, they are about to close their copycat site, Bamarang, down — folding it into its more successful stablemate, WestWing.
The fact that Germany’s Rocket Internet is launching another clone should come as a surprise to no-one. But even with their copycat reputation, cutting and pasting code for their new Nigerian online store seems more than little bit lazy.
Women at NBCU, NBCUniversal’s female-targeted ad sales, marketing and research initiative, is launching a new digital advisory board called [email protected] Members include Google’s Marissa Mayer, Twitter’s Chloe Sladden and One Kings Lane’s Alison Pincus.
Fab.com said iPad users represent 15 percent of its customer but make up 25 percent of revenue. And 40 percent of iPad users make their first purchase within 3 months. IPad app users are expected to bring in twice as much revenue as non iPad users.
After trying to become a social network, the team behind Fab.com pivoted a year ago toward their current model as a design site because it was something the founders were passionate about. It’s another reminder that passion matters and can be what determines success.
Monoqi, the European competitor to design flash sales site Fab.com, launches this week. What makes it different? CEO Simon Fabich says it’s a “curated design platform” that sports a less commercial taste than its American rival.
At just 2.5 years old, Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a tech industry institution with holdings in Facebook, Twitter, and more. GigaOM talked with Andreessen to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley and the larger tech landscape.
Online design store Fab.com is just seven months old, but it’s showing all kinds of momentum, racking up 1.65 million users and 750,000 items sold so far. Now, the company is making its first acquisition, buying up FashionStake, an online marketplace for independent fashion.
Design store Fab.com has seen a surge in mobile use since launching mobile apps in October, with 30 percent of traffic now coming in via mobile. But more impressive is the fact that mobile visitors are generating twice as much revenue than visitors to Fab’s website.
