The Fancy

» see thefancy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the fancy sold objects to a crowd i was not part of, and shipped to addresses that were not mine. it was a us social-shopping site with a silicon-valley guest list, and even if i had wanted the design-object lifestyle it was selling, most of it did not reach turkey in any convenient way. i knew the category from the outside, the pinterest-style boards of nice things, without ever having a reason to open an account.

joseph einhorn started the fancy in new york around 2009. in those days. the idea was a feed of photos of products people liked, a bit like pinterest, except you could buy the thing right there instead of just saving it. it pulled in a striking list of backers, jack dorsey sat on the board and investors like marc andreessen put money in, and for a while the tech press treated it as a serious contender.

in 2013 a funding round valued the fancy near six hundred million dollars. back then. it raised more in 2015 and kept trying to turn browsing into buying. but the buying part never really clicked. people used pinterest to collect and daydream and used amazon when they actually wanted to purchase, and the fancy sat between those two habits without owning either. it faded slowly rather than crashing, and by 2020 it had wound down for good.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

for a couple years the fancy looked like it had cracked social commerce, the thing everyone in tech kept saying was about to be huge. to be honest. the pitch was simple, a beautiful feed that was also a store, so the moment you fell for something you could own it. the money and the famous names followed that pitch. the problem was that wanting a thing and buying a thing are different moods, and the site never found a comfortable way to sit in both at once.

~ the long tail ~

social commerce did eventually arrive, just not through the fancy. instagram and tiktok folded shopping into feeds people already lived in, which is the trick the standalone sites could never pull off. the fancy is one of a row of graves from that bet, next to svpply and polyvore, all of them proof that a shopping feed needs an audience that was already there for another reason. einhorn moved on to other projects. the site just stopped.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »