AHALife acquires online design marketplace Bezar

Dive Brief:

Australian e-commerce company AHALife has acquired Bezar, the home goods and accessories site founded last year by Fab co-founder Bradford Shellhammer.
Just last month, Re/Code reported that the venture was losing money and on the brink of going out of business.
The sale is the latest stumble for a company in the flash-sales space. Despite the downfall of Fab, Shellhammer had said that his new attempt would benefit from lessons learned. But the company eventually pivoted away from the flash-sales model to a marketplace, to little avail.

Dive Insight:

Fab.com, one of the promising stars of the flash-sales space that flamed out spectacularly in 2014, was Bezar founder Bradford Shellhammer's first try at making the flash-sales model work. Now, it appears that his second attempt is officially over, too. Shellhammer has said he learned much from Fab’s ill-fated run, but his dedication to the flash-sales model may have been his undoing.

In any case, AHALife is an e-commerce marketplace much like what Bezar defaulted to after abandoning the flash-sales concept, so the acquisition is a good fit.

While Bezar will remain as a stand-alone marketplace for now, its wares and sellers may eventually be folded into AHALife’s platform.

Shellhammer says the acquisition has been a possibility for months and that AHALife CEO Shauna Mei has been eager to combine their efforts. "When we got to talking this summer, as I had the options of what we wanted to do with Bezar in front of me, she and I kept coming back to the same conversation, that together we’d be a much stronger force than apart," he told Fast Company magazine.

Shellhammer, who has been curating many of Bezar’s offerings since its inception, will continue to advise the company, but not run it.

"I am going to take an active role in shepherding over our 13,000-plus designers on our platform as well as our customers and much of my team," he told Fast Company. "It’s really an acquisition in the sense that the brand assets will become AHAlife and as well as our relationships with designers, our social media presence, and much of the team.”