Fab.com, the US-based e-commerce site for design products which has just been copied by the Samwer brothers, is now expanding into Europe with the acquisition of Germany’s Casacanda GmbH. According to the Wall Street Journal, today they announced the acquisition as an all-stock deal valuing the startup at around $10 million.
The Berlin-based startup Fab.com was founded in 2011 by Jason Goldberg. Jason, who also acts as the CEO of Fab.com, recently stated that Casacanda’s website will be re-launched as Fab.de in the coming days, and Casacanda’s 40 employees will join Fab.com’s existing team of 170 global employees.
This is an aggressive and important next step for Fab, considering that just 3 weeks ago, Rocket Internet, the ‘clone factory’ of the Samwer brothers launched the Fab.com clone Bamarang. They not only copied the business model of Fab.com as a flash sales site specialised in daily discounted design products, but also almost photocopied the design.
Jason Goldberg, the CEO of Fab.com, stated within a recent post on his personal blog article ‘Knock-offs are a bad design’: “The worst offender is a new company, bamarang, operating out of the UK and Germany from the infamous Rocket Internet – Samwer brothers. Their site is not just a copycat, it’s frankly just stealing our unique Fab design elements.” (Update – February 2023: The blog seems to be no longer working and we therefore deactivated the link).
It’s more than likely that the launch of the Fab copy Bamarang and this recent acquisition are directly related. Could it be understood as a declaration of war to the Samwer brothers?
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[…] by Goldberg as well), the latest move of Fab.com could be interpreted as a direct countermove. As EU-Startups.com has it: It’s more then likely that the launch of the Fab clone Bamarang and this recent […]
[…] week, Fab.com started its expanding into Europe with the acquisition of the Berlin based Casacanda GmbH. The acquisition was an all-stock deal, valuing Casacanda at around $10 million, and an important […]