Fab.com acquires German clone Casacanda, now serving Europe

Fab.com, the wildly popular design-focused e-commerce site, has just acquired Casacanda, a German startup offering “an online shopping club for daily design inspirations.”

If that mission statement sounds familiar, it’s not just you. The Fab.com team saw the similarities as well, and decided that snapping up Casacanda would make for a smoother transition into international waters than building a competing product from scratch.

Fab execs hinted last month that international operations would be coming soon. The startup’s CEO, Jason Goldberg, said in a recent email to VentureBeat, “We’re planning to grow from 2 million members to 5 million this year worldwide. We’re prepared to handle it.”

Goldberg also said today that Fab’s trademark design-first service would be coming to other parts of Europe soon.

Today, Casacanda will relaunch as Fab.de. The rebranded site will serve residents in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. All 45 of Casacanda’s employees will now be working for Fab.

Fab.de’s product listings will be sourced both locally and globally, Goldberg revealed. “We have a good amount of crossover as well as unique products. In terms of the first month of Fab.de products, it’s about 30 percent similar to the U.S. and 70 percent originally sourced by the Fab.de team,” the CEO said.

Casacanda brings 250,000 members with it into the Fab fold, 90,000 of whom joined in the last 30 days. In toto, Fab.com now includes 2.3 million member shoppers, all of whom signed up in the past eight months.

The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but the company has been on a fundraising tear to produce just this kind of growth. Fab.com took $8 million in funding in July 2011 and quickly continued to raise a gargantuan $40 million round just a few months later in December.

Eventually, Goldberg told us, he hopes to make Fab.com the better-designed competitor to Amazon.com — with all the latter’s size and commercial power. And Fab will be raising more money along the way to make that vision a reality.

“Our scale in mind is Amazon-size scale, so, yes, we’ll raise more money in the future,” Goldberg said in a recent VentureBeat interview. “Amazon raised billions to be what it is today. We have Amazon-size ambitions to deliver great design options to people everywhere across all categories at all price points.”

Casacanda was founded in August 2011, at which time it took an undisclosed amount of funding from three German angel investors.