Thursday, February 23, 2012
Don’t Just Pin It, Buy It: Pinterest Rival Fancy Figures Out Social Commerce
Amid the increased speculation surrounding Silicon Valley darling Pinterest’s forthcoming revenue model, competitor Fancy, a social photo-clipping service popular among the style-conscious set, has been quietly working on revenue ideas of its own. Previously, the service was doling out coupon code to users who “fancy’d” images belonging to specific merchants, but today, the site is diving head-first into social commerce.
Starting now, Fancy users will not only be able to post, like (“fancy”) and share photos of things they find inspiring, they’ll also be able to purchase them directly on Fancy’s website itself.
Fancy is often lumped into the same category as other photo-pinning startups like Pinterest, which gets credit for having invented the space despite Tumblr’s head start in popularizing the image re-posting format. But Fancy, its functional similarities notwithstanding, is no Pinterest.
For starters, Pinterest users are predominantly female, and seem happiest when pinning things like craft projects, recipes, funny quips about parenting, motivational sayings, decorative items for the home, and other types of photographic inspiration. Meanwhile, Fancy’s users are currently 60 percent male, and are more often posting consumer goods of the Fab.com variety; high-fashion clothes and accessories and photos of exotic locales.
“We’re really focused on the commerce angle, and I think different sites may be focused on self-expression,” Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn tells us, describing how Fancy is unique in the photo re-posting space. “We’ve constrained our growth to be laser-focused on commerce, and that’s working for us in terms of the quality that’s on the site,” he explains.
Though much smaller than Pinterest’s 10 million+ users, Fancy’s 250,000 registered users fancy’d over 1 million products last week from the web, mobile and tablet combined, and 150,000 of those were fancy’d yesterday. Every day, around 100,000 to 200,000 unique visitors are browsing, favoriting, and sharing the site’s photos. Starting now, they’ll be able to buy what they see, too, without leaving the website.
Fancy, whose parent company is thingsd, already has some impressive supporters (hello, Kanye), as well as board members like Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), Chris Hughes (Facebook), Jim Pallotta, and LeRoy Kim (partner at Allen & Co.).
The startup’s investor line-up also includes top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Allen & Co., General Catalyst, Esther Dyson, Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, MTV creator Bob Pittman, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Eric Eisner, Jeff Samberg, oh, and Ashton Kutcher.
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