Fab Cofounder Bradford Shellhammer Is Launching Design Sales Site Bezar
After a year of soul-searching, Fab cofounder and former creative director Bradford Shellhammer is back in the flash sales game with his forthcoming startup Bezar, an online short-term sales hub for designers who are hand picked by Shellhammer.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bezar is Bradford Shellhammer's attempt to rebuild what he built at Fab — but on far smaller foundations. His former company collapsed from a $900M valuation into a distressed exit, with PCH buying Fab.com to use as a hardware sales channel, and his cofounder Jason Goldberg had already spun out furniture site Hem, which bought Discipline.eu before putting itself up for sale with Vitra as the likely buyer.
So Bezar is the second act in a sequence where both Fab founders returned to the same design-commerce playbook that just failed at scale. The related coverage closes the loop fast: barely ten months later, sources report Bezar is running out of money, making this launch less a fresh start than a test of whether the flash-sales model itself survives its founders' second attempts.
First-order effects
- Shellhammer gets a curated storefront for hand-picked designers, but the launch lands while his own track record — Fab's fall from $900M to a sale worth as little as $15M — is still fresh, so credibility rests entirely on curation rather than scale.
Second-order effects
- With Hem also shopping for a buyer around the same period, independent designers face a shrinking set of venture-backed design sales channels at exactly the moment Bezar's funding troubles surface.
Third-order effects
- If both Fab founders' follow-ons struggle, the lesson for the design-commerce sector is structural: the problem was never execution alone but the short-term-discount sales model, pushing designers toward owned storefronts or consolidated buyers like Vitra and PCH instead of flash-sale intermediaries.
The trend: Post-Fab, the curated flash-sales model in design e-commerce is being tested by its own founders' relaunches — and failing them — signaling consolidation around acquirers rather than standalone sales sites.