Startups

Fab.com Acquires FashionStake to Build Out Fashion Offering

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Design-focused daily deals site Fab.com has acquired FashionStake, a two-year-old retail startup backed by Battery Ventures, for an undisclosed sum, both companies announced Friday.

FashionStake‘s founders, fellow Harvard Business School graduates Daniel Gulati and Vivian Weng, will head upFab.com‘s expanding fashion vertical going forward. The rest of FashionStake’s team will not be joining Fab.com’s ranks and the site will cease operations after the acquisition, Weng says.

FashionStake’s history has been a short but interesting one. When the site launched in September 2010, consumers were invited to support emerging designers by buying “stakes” in not-yet-produced collections in exchange for discounts and other privileges when said collections were manufactured. Gulati and Weng soon realized that customers were more excited about pre-ordering items at a discount, and so they quickly adapted the site to that model. FashionStake was still able to offer these items as a discount because the company could use pre-order numbers to gauge demand ahead of production.

In March 2011, FashionStake overhauled its model once again. In its third iteration, the site behaved more like a traditional online boutique that continued to invest in its key focus areas: independent design, significant discounts and customer engagement. Shoppers were able to purchase apparel and accessories from designers they could never find in their local Macy’s or Saks.

But Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg has no plans to incorporate any part of FashionStake’s retail model or backend technology. Rather, Goldberg says he was largely attracted to the relationships Gulati and Weng had developed with the more than 400 independent designers featured on FashionStake, many of whom will soon gain exposure to Fab.com’s larger, rapidly expanding membership. The startup, which boasts 1.65 million members to date, has acquired 350,000 members in the last 30 days alone, Goldberg says.

When asked if she had any major lessons to impart about her first startup experience, Weng spoke of FashionStake’s need to test first, invest later. “You need to feel there’s some sort of traction or resonance with a customer before building out [a product or feature],” she said. “The last two years we have tried to learn and adjust as quickly as we could, and that’s something we’ve been very proud of.”

In her new role, Weng added that she was looking forward to moving away from infrastructure development toward business development. “To be able to come in and have a greater customer service team, great logistics and a solid warehousing process is really attractive to [myself and Gulati],” she said. “Now we’ll be thinking more about the core elements of the business, how to message our views and our products to the customer.”

Online Odd Jobs: How Startups Let You Fund Yourself

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Graduate student Liz Langer has recovered a stranger’s Mercedes keys from a sewer using a fishing pole and magnet. She’s assembled a Festivus pole for a holiday party she didn’t attend, and delivered coffee to an office building she never worked in — all in the name of beer money.

“Most part-time jobs want you to do four-hour shifts, which is hard to do in grad school,” says Langer, who is enrolled at the University of Illinois Chicago.

So when a friend told her about Zaarly, an app that lets users complete odd jobs for extra cash, she signed up. Running errands between classes — $80 for recovered keys, $5 for coffee delivery — she says she earns between $200 and $400 every month.

Zaarly isn’t the only startup creating unconventional employment opportunities. Taskrabbit has created a similar peer-to-peer task market, Airbnb has handled more than 2 million nights worth of transactions between people who are renting each others’ homes and spare rooms, and Skillshare facilitates transactions for offline classes on anything.

Via Internet startups, you can also pick up extra cash serving as a tourguide to an experience you already know inside and out or renting your car.

In an economy with an 8.6% unemployment rate, these startups present the potential for flexible extra income. In some cases, they can effectively become full-time jobs.

“You can really just create your own little economy around the things you’re good at,” says Avi Flombaum, who started teaching a Skillshare course on computer programming in May. “You get to define how your hours are spent.”

At first, Flombaum taught Skillshare classes just to earn some extra cash, but his number of classes escalated quickly. He quit his full-time job in August, and he now spends about 30 hours on his Skillshare courses each week. He says he makes more through Skillshare than he did at his former job as a CTO for an Internet startup.

When Fombaum gets back from a month in Nicaragua — a trip that will be partly funded by renting his apartment on Airbnb while he’s away — he plans to launch his own startup. Thanks to his teaching gig, he won’t need to pursue funding.

The Internet has been facilitating this sort of flexible employment for some time. ChaCha, for instance, employees 180,000 freelance “guides” that get paid for every answer they submit to its ad-supported Q&A service. Kerry Boure has been working as one of those guides, answering questions such as “how many M&Ms do you need to stack before you reach the moon?”, for more than five years.

“It allows me to stay home and take care of the kids,” says Boure, who also has a masters degree in criminal justice.

Although she clocks about 40 hours every week on ChaCha and has formed friendships with other ChaCha guides, she doesn’t consider her daily occupation a job. “To me, a job is getting up every day and putting on a suit,” she says. “You can’t support yourself with just one online job.”

Flombaum’s Skillshare classes have little in common with Boure’s ChaCha answers. But Flombaum agrees that the day when most people can support themselves on one such source of income may well have passed.

“Instead of having all of your pay come from one source, you can have these different streams,” he says. “It follows the general trend of decentralization on the web.”

“It speaks to the fact that our generation has had to be more inventive in our careers,” Langer says of her time fielding Zaarly requests. “There is no ‘you’ll get that job and have it for 30 years’…It pays to get as many skills as possible.’”