Fab Buzz

Fab.com, the shopping Web site that raised $40 million late last year in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, has revamped its site to highlight more social features, including the ability to filter its live shopping feed by category, buy straight from the feed, and see what Facebook friends are buying.

That’s because, at its core, Fab isn’t about task-based shopping, the way Amazon is (as in “I need a hammer so let me go online to find a hammer that I like”). Rather, it’s more about window shopping, or what Goldberg calls “discovery” (as in “I’m not looking for anything in particular, but if I see something I like, I’ll get it”).

Fab is taking social to the next level.

Fab.com got its latest revamp this morning, introducing a host of snazzy new social features. We hope your Facebook friends have good taste.

‘From the beginning, we never really thought of Fab as a flash sales site, we thought of ourselves as design,’ explains CEO Jason Goldberg. ‘People appreciate Fab for discovery, or for finding products they didn’t know existed, or for delighting them, and price is not a big deal. We don’t want people to think ‘sale, sale, sale,’’ he says.

Social media enabled Fab to amplify exponentially the old tried and true of someone finds an amazing chair, they bring it home and tell four friends about it when they come over. In the same way people see something on Fab, they go crazy about it and tell their friends.

A social network for gay men racks up 150,000 users in no time. One day the founders scrap it and put down an all-the-marbles bet on what they know: design. A design shopping site emerges, investors line up, and soon Demi Moore is tweeting about sales and signups go moonward. It all happened.

Fab pairs each item with the story behind it, making shoppers feel supportive of the seller. ‘People invest more in things they form emotional attachments to,’ Bradford Shellhamer says.