Fab.com handpicks the merchandise it sells

LOS ANGELES -- Bradford Shellhammer is scouring designer Kii Arens' collection here for great rock concert poster art to sell on his website, Fab.com.

Unlike a traditional e-tailer, such as Amazon or Buy.com, Fab handpicks the merchandise.

"It's pretty simple," Shellhammer says. We look for "things that make us smile."

So far, people all over the world seem to be clicking with Shellhammer's design sensibilities. He and business partner Jason Goldberg are grinning all the way to the bank.

The website, which sells everything from shoes, chairs and jewelry to luggage and rugs, is on track to move $100 million worth of merchandise this year. The site, launched in June 2011, has amassed 5 million registered users and is growing so fast that it's expanded from 25 employees last year to 400 employees today.

Thursday, Fab is expected to close $105 million in new funding, organized by Atomico, the investment firm founded by Niklas Zennstrom, best known as the co-creator of Skype.

"We have tens of thousands of products for sale now," says Goldberg, Fab's CEO. With the new infusion of cash, "We want to sell hundreds of thousands of products and launch in more countries."

Goldberg says Fab found an audience so quickly because it has a different style than other e-tailers.

"We're edgy. We're modern. We're colorful," he says. "You walk into most retailers and there are two or three colors they are showing that season. That's not how people live."

Consumers, says Shellhammer, "are sick of buying mass-produced crap. They want to understand where the (products) came from and who made them."

At Arens' studio, Shellhammer admires replicas of colorful pointy hats worn by punk group Devo in the 1970s and puts them on during a photo shoot.

Los Angeles designer Jen Murse shows off her oversized piano keyboard rings at Arens' studio.

Shortly after Murse's Plastique jewelry became available for sale on Fab last year, a buyer for New York retailer Barney's saw it and asked Murse if it could carry her work as well.

Being on Fab "increased my business a lot," she says. "It's been a very positive experience."

Arens, who creates rock concert posters for the likes of Devo, Willie Nelson and Radiohead, says he, too, experienced a sales lift for his work.

Fab has "exposed my art career to so many different people," he says. From that came the opportunity to design for "more musicians."

Jeff Jordan, a general partner at venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (investors in Facebook and Skype), which raised $40 million in Fab's second round of financing, calls the website the "fastest-growing e-commerce business I've ever seen, going from zero to $100 million in just one year."

The key to its success is its visual presentation, Jordan says. "Look at e-commerce 1.0 online shopping, and it was for nerds. Men put keyword phrases into Amazon and bought. Fab is e-commerce 2.0, shopping for everyone else. You see the beautiful product laid out in front of you, and it's easy to be drawn in."

Shellhammer, a former New York designer and blogger, and Goldberg, who founded and sold two previous start-ups, Jobster and Socialmedian, originally set up to have a gay social-network site, Fabulius. But after a year and just 100,000 users, they decided to try "and go big," says Goldberg, and try e-commerce instead.

"We homed in on our passions," says Goldberg. "For me it's websites, and for Bradford it's design and products people take home."