Design-focused startup Fab.com is launching a new type of shopping experience today with the debut of what it’s calling “Weekly Speciality Shops.” These new stores will be targeted across five of Fab.com’s well-performing verticals: Kids, Pets, Foodie, Vintage Modern and Fashion. These are not Fab.com’s top verticals, however, but are those that appeal to particular segments of shoppers.
As the name implies, the new shops will have sales that occur weekly and last for seven days, as opposed to Fab’s standard 3-day flash sales.
The company made the decision to move into longer sales within these verticals based on data gathered from monitoring sales, analyzing social media shares, studying data, and doing user surveys. In the end, the decision was that these customers could be better targeted by separating them out from Fab’s normal flash sales.
“When we looked at the data,” explains CEO Jason Goldberg, “we saw certain categories on the site sold out really quickly, but we didn’t have the depth on our site…we wanted to go deeper into these categories,” he says. To that end, the company has added hundreds of designers over the last few weeks to support the new shops.
Each of the Weekly Shops will feature several hundred sale items and will also include new opt-in email mechanisms by category. In other words, if you want to be alerted to Kids’ weekly sale items, but not Pet stuff, you can now do so. The additional email configuration settings can now be found in Fab’s Email Preferences screen, where users can also customize notifications for Daily Sales, Weekly Previews, Inspirations and Invites.
The lineup for the weekly sales is as follows:
- Vintage Modern Mondays – launches Monday February 20th and then weekly thereafter. Featuring vintage finds hand-picked by Fab’s curators.
- Fashion Tuesdays – launches Tuesday February 21st and then weekly thereafter. Featuring the best in independent fashion for women and men.
- Kids Wednesdays – launches Wednesday February 15th and then weekly thereafter. Featuring the best in kids design products for parents and their children.
- Pets Thursdays – launches Thursday February 16th and then weekly thereafter. Featuring the best in well designed pet products.
- Foodie Fridays – launches Friday February 17th and then weekly thereafter. Featuring great designs in edibles, prep, and kitchen essentials.
By the end of last year, Fab says it housed 3,000 items on its site per day. Now, it’s approaching over 10,000. It also now has over 2 million users. At the heart of this growth is the way each type of design category, demographic and shop theme is offered and presented on the site, something that’s no longer as simple as finding great stuff and throwing it up there to see what works, as CEO Jason Goldberg admits was how the company operated back in the beginning. Now the focus is more on building the brand: “we want people to think of Fab when they think of design,” he says.
With the addition of the Weekly Shops, Fab.com can no longer really be called just a “flash sales” site – its 3-day flash sales are only one of the ways to find items. Already, Fab offered month-long pop-up shops around specific themes, and now these weekly sales are available as yet another way to have an extended shopping experience on both web and mobile.