This week’s addition to Startup Graveyard is Fab.com.
Fab.com is one of those startup stories that looks great from the outside at first.
It had hype.
It had funding.
It had attention.
It had growth.
But that growth came with a lot of operational weight.
Fab started as a design-focused e-commerce company and grew quickly. The idea was to create a place where people could discover and buy interesting design products online.
The problem was that the company expanded aggressively before the business model was strong enough to support it.
It moved into inventory, warehouses, international markets, and a much more complicated operating model. That kind of expansion can look exciting when funding is available and growth numbers are strong, but it also increases the pressure on the business.
More inventory means more risk.
More warehouses mean more fixed costs.
More markets mean more complexity.
More growth means more places for weak economics to break.
The lesson from Fab.com is pretty simple:
Growth is not automatically validation.
A startup can grow fast and still be building on top of a fragile model.
Sometimes the better question is not:
How fast can we scale?
It is:
Can the business survive the scale?
Fab is a good reminder that raising money and growing quickly does not remove the need for strong margins, retention, and operational discipline.
I added Fab.com to Startup Graveyard today.
https://www.startupgraveyard.co
If you are building something, this is one of those failures worth studying.
