How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web
A purple rooster sculpture made from recycled grape Fanta bottle labels. Clocks designed to hang in corners. Bauhaus posters from the 1920s. Hand-painted vintage typewriters. These are some of the carefully curated objects for sale on Fab.com …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Business Week profile arrives mid-arc in a running story about commerce migrating online in curated form. Back in July 2007, Webware covered Bringsome, an early bet that shoppers would pay intermediaries to source and ship desirable physical goods across borders — the same underlying premise that goods themselves, not just listings, are the product. In December 2011 even Google experimented with selling physical objects, opening a Zazzle store for its Doodles.
What the profile documents is the next step: a German team applying the clone playbook — replicating proven web business models market by market — to design retail itself, with Fab.com selling carefully chosen objects like 1920s Bauhaus posters and hand-painted typewriters. The confirmed reporting frames the founders' method explicitly as cloning successful models, which makes Fab less a boutique story than a case study in whether curation can be industrialized.
First-order effects
- Fab.com's curated flash-sales model puts immediate pricing and taste pressure on established design retailers and earlier flash-sale sites, whose inventory-led catalogs compete against a tightly edited daily selection.
- The German founders behind Fab demonstrate the clone playbook aimed inward at the US consumer market, validating replication of American models on their home turf rather than exporting them to Europe.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in curated e-commerce must respond by locking up exclusive supply — designers, limited editions, licensed archives like Bauhaus — because a cloned storefront model is easy to copy but signed inventory is not.
- Designers and small manufacturers gain a new high-velocity distribution channel, shifting bargaining power toward whichever marketplace controls the customer relationship and the drop calendar.
Third-order effects
- If cloning proven models keeps working faster than incumbents can defend, the durable edge in e-commerce migrates from the business-model layer — which anyone can replicate — to supply exclusivity and brand, pushing the industry toward consolidation around whoever owns the makers.
- The pattern points toward curation becoming a standard retail function rather than a differentiator, with regulation and trade norms eventually catching up to borderless model-replication firms.
The trend: E-commerce is shifting from inventing business models to replicating proven ones across markets, leaving curated and exclusive supply as the last defensible ground.