Fab.com on track to hit $100 million in sales in 2012

The daily design deal site hits three million members and has sold one million deals

Fab.com, a website that sends its users daily deals on design items, is making some significant milestones at its very young age. 

The site in its current form was only launched nine months ago but it has already sold one million deals and has three million users, said Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer, the founders of the website, at the London Web Summit. Additionally, the two said the site is on track to generate more than $100 million in 2012. 

"We have had nine months of sales, and sold one million products as of 12 March. That's 111,111 per month, 2.6 per minute," said Goldberg. "For a company that didn't exist a year ago, it's phenomenal."

Fab.com made a big breakthrough when it launched its first smart phone apps in October of 2011. One month later it had a million members. In January, the site had 1.5 million members, and has now doubled that figure. Now, 40% of the site's sales come from its apps, with 25% of its total sales from the iPad alone.

Fab.com was founded in February 2010 by CEO Goldberg and Chief Creative Officer Shellhammer as a social networking for gay men called Fabulis. The site did not do very well, only winding up with around 150,000 members, and Fabulis was forced to rebranded itself in December 2010 as Fab.com. It began offering daily deals, called The Big Gay Deal of the Day, in February of 2011. In June of 2011 the site stopped catering exclusively to the gay community and it became the Fab.com that people use now.

"In August 2011 we realised we weren't in the design sales business, but in the business of making people smile every day. We decided we'd be guided by emotion first. Our job is to wow and excite them. We look at products that wow people first and sales second. If we get people to share products on Facebook or Twitter, the sales will happen over time," Goldberg said.

In January, Fab.com purchased fashion website Fashionstake for an undisclosed sum. The same month, Fab was among Facebook’s initial partners as part of its integration of social tools through the Facebook Timeline. In February, Fab.com bought German flash sales website Casacanda for an estimated $10M. 

In July 2011, the company raised $1 million in  funding from Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel, SoftTech VC and previous backers First Round Capital, Baroda Ventures and The Washington Post. The same month they raised another $8 million in funding led by Menlo Ventures, along with several existing investors. 

In December 2011, Fab.com raised a $40 million round of funding led by investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.

(Image source: Inc.com)