Fab adds $105M to its designer shopping cart

Fab.com is rolling in the dough now that they have confirmed closing a $105 million round of funding. This is the third major round of the funding that the design-focused flash-sales site has secured. This latest round was backed by Atomico Ventures.

Just last December, Fab raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz for a site that took a while to really find its sweet spot in highly-curated, design-centric items.

CEO and founder Jason Goldberg expressed in a blog on Wednesday that the new round of helps give the company a “special opportunity to create one of the world’s next great brands.” Goldberg went on to remark that they are “building a franchise based on a consistent, thoughtful experience that puts customers first, not profits. We’re focused more on ensuring the long term success of that franchise than we are with near term gains.”

Fab has plans to put this new funding into warehouses and inventory to shorten shipping times to “just a few days.” The Fab team also wants to increase the number of products to exceed the 10,000 per day it has now, and continue expanding into markets outside the U.S. Fab is currently in the U.S., Canada, and 18 European countries. 

Just this April, Fab expanded its brand to include beauty products and partnered with Glamour Magazine to offer its users top-shelf beauty products at big box store prices.

Fab has taken well to the idea of curating and selling hand-picked items for people with a design-focused aesthetic and people are responding in droves. Now with more than five million users Fab is crafting new verticals for its clients including kids products, pet items and fashion offering.

The new pop-up shop, offers high-quality make-up, skincare products, lip care, candles and more. Brands featured include Nest Fragrances, Philip B. Botanical Products, Oscar Blandi, Pangea, and Demeter.

These curated offerings are quite a few steps removed from how Fab started out — as group buying gay-centric deal site — and in the last few months the stats have spoken for themselves with more than 100,000 products sold each month (thats nearly three items every minute.)

At the start of the year, Fab also announced that it acquired the community-selected marketplace of designers: FashionStake. Details of the deal were not disclosed. And Fab has continued to eye more Internet design groups that could help grow the company.

In the past two years, Fab.com has done a lot of innovating and pivoting to find its niche and was handsomely rewarded with more than $50 million of funding from venture big boys such as Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures and First Round Capital

Now that the company has the capital to start acquiring other design and daily deal sites, we could see Fab.com close in on one of the biggest names in daily and flash sale companies — One Kings Lane. 

One Kings Lane has seen tremendous growth and has collected more than $63 million in funding over the last year. The company is now exceeding $100 million in yearly revenues after experiencing an “explosive 2010” in which annual sales jumped more than 500%, with 75% of those sales coming from repeat customers. 

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

The founders of the website, Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer, explained last months at the London Web Summit that the company 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 has a great chance of making the expansion to fashion deals from design deals but it will have to show that it still has its own perspective and personality in order to not get lumped in with the masses — and having a Madonna stamp couldn’t hurt a company based on fashion and design. 

With online shopping and unique, specialized buying experiences on the rise, I think that this is only the tip of Fab.com’s iceberg — and it has a sweet matching clutch and kitten heels.