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Just Fab Sues Fab Over Trademark Infringement, Unfair Competition And More. Fab Says It Will “Aggressively Defend Our Brand”
Just Fab, the shoes and apparel e-commerce site that has raised $109 million, is taking to the courts to make sure that no one steps on its feet as it expands beyond its home market of the U.S. The company has filed a lawsuit against Fab.com, the other popular fashion commerce site with “Fab” in its name (funding raised: $321 million), over trademark infringement over a “confusingly similar” name, along with related allegations, including unfair competition. Fab.com has already told us it intends to fight the lawsuit “aggressively”:
“Our attorneys are currently reviewing the complaint,” said a spokesperson. “While we are not in a position to comment with any specificity on the allegations we will aggressively defend our brand, products, and services offered to our customers worldwide.”
The case, first brought to our attention by DomainNameWire, was filed in the U.S. Central District of California, and requests that Fab.com be prevented from selling any items that compete directly with JustFab.com, and to pay for damages of any lost business resulting from confusion over the brands. We’re embedding the full complaint below.
This is not the first time that Fab.com has been in the courts over trademark infringement, although the last time it was on the plaintiff’s side (that suit, against Touch Of Modern, has now been settled).
Meanwhile, JustFab has been dealing with other fashion sites that use the word “Fab” in their brand names in another way — it’s been buying them. In January 2013, it bought Fab Kids; and in May it bought European site Fab Shoes. That route would be more tricky with Fab.com, which is now apparently valued at $1 billion.
Just Fab (original name: Just Fabulous and founded in 2010) is taking issue with the fact that Fab.com not only shares the same name but offers a service that is too similar to Just Fab’s. Just Fab notes in the suit that after Fab.com pivoted in 2011 to focus on e-commerce from starting out as a social networking site, it focused on discounts for site members, similar to Just Fab.
Fab.com, the lawsuit notes, “completely changed their business model from social networking to on-line retailing that, like Just Fab’s business, emphasized excellent design at bargain prices.”
It goes on to note that like Just Fab, Fab.com focuses on special deals for members; and that they carry many of the same brands. Together with the name, the similar product offerings cause “marketplace confusion.” (To note, Fab is continuing to evolve, with flash sales now being de-emphasized at Fab.com in favor of a more social-commerce-style follower model.)
There is another interesting parallel between the two companies: despite the ongoing consolidation among smaller players, the biggest are continuing to move ahead. Both Fab and JustFab have projected that they will make $250 million in revenues this year.
We have reached out to Just Fab for more comment beyond the lawsuit and will update this post as we learn more.
Now Analyzing More Than 15 Billion Actions A Month, Mixpanel Launches A Big Marketing Campaign And A Conference About Analytics
Andreessen Horowitz-backed analytics startup Mixpanel has been growing quickly over the last year, adding new customers and rapidly expanding the amount of data it tracks. Now it’s looking to grab more customers and help them better understand their users, with a big marketing push in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and the launch of a conference about data-driven decision making.
If you haven’t been paying much attention to Mixpanel, that’s probably because analytics are pretty boring. I mean, analytics are boring but important to understanding where your growth and users are coming from and ultimately how you can get more users.
But if you are in the guru/ninja/growth hacking business, you probably have at least one of your four displays tuned to Mixpanel all day long while you sip $5 locally roasted fair trade coffee and rub your beard and say to yourself, “Hrm, interesting.” Maybe you’ll call one of your coworkers over and point at your screen and say, “Hey, look at this. I had no idea our conversation rate on that campaign was so strong.”
That’s because Mixpanel is like, an ultra-customizable version of Google Analytics (or, insert any other boring analytics engine you can think of) that allows you to really dig deep and get in there and find out what your users are doing. Last summer it launched a user analytics module which it extended out to kind of creepily track what they’re doing with a user activity feed. That, of course, helps with customers support — like, not only do you know what users are doing and where they’re coming from but you can also send them messages and interact with them and get feedback.
That’s got a lot of gurus and ninjas and growth hackers scratching their beards and pointing at their screens and bugging their coworkers. In fact, Mixpanel now has more than 1,300 mobile apps and websites paying to use its platform, and together, they’re analyzing more than 15 billion actions each month. Revenue is growing 10 percent each month, and it’s adding about a billion more interactions each month.
Ok, so it’s gotten this far with basically no marketing whatsoever. Which means it’s an awesome time to move from online marketing, which it can track, to offline marketing, which exists in a world that no one truly understands and leads to people saying they don’t know which half of their advertising budget is wasted. Now Mixpanel wants to wonder the same thing.
So if you’re one of the poor souls who drives up and down 101 every day you’ll probably start noticing billboards with various pieces of interesting, trivial data points it has lifted from Mixpanel Trends, a free data set that it recently released to anyone who wants to know what people are doing with those 15 billion actions and on which devices or whatnot. Or if you’re in the Caltrain station, or basically if you find yourself near any location where a startup exists in SOMA, you’ll probably also see a Mixpanel ad through the month of August.
Mixpanel has also succumbed to the inevitable desire to launch a startup conference… because, well, startup conferences. But more than just an advertisement for its own products or a thinly veiled excuse to have a has-been rock band play a nearby local venue, Mixpanel’s DDC2013 conference (which stands for data-driven conference, I think) is all about bringing together smart people to make analytics sound interesting for an afternoon. It’s enlisted 21 speakers to take on that task, most of whom you’ve probably heard of. They’ll talk about how analytics is affecting everything startups do, from product design to marketing to whatever.
Still with me? Mixpanel has raised $12 million from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks.
Lenstag Helps You Track Your Super-Expensive Photography Gear For Theft Recovery And Prevention
If you’re a photographer, professional or hobbyist, you probably know that you can accumulate gear costs quickly. All those costs can be hard to keep track of, making it imperative that you get your stuff insured and/or protected against theft somehow. New site Lenstag wants to help with that.
The website already has users in more than 80 countries and is free to use. Photographers can get in on it by signing up with a simple email and password combo, and then you just start adding gear. Enter a make and model, and suggestions will appear allowing you to be specific. You also enter in your serial code, which the site requires photographic evidence of to verify. An actual person does the final verification, which is why Lenstag isn’t your average possession database.
Lenstag having this information means you can give eBay buyers more peace of mind, and then actually transfer ownership to other Lenstag members. You can also report stolen gear, which allows people to look it up when they recover or find stolen gear, including police departments and private buyers shopping on Craigslist, for instance. Additionally, every piece of gear gets an auto-generate page designed to float up in search results, so that if someone is checking out a perspective search on a particular model of lens or camera with your serial number, they’ll see a notice that it’s stolen and get a form to submit a report.
The site introduced a new feature that lets you make a temporary verification link for their online sales of used camera goods, which is handy since you don’t want the listing hanging around once the gear is already sold. In general, it’s an amazing service and one that requires nothing more than a small amount of extra effort for a lot of extra peace of mind.
Lenstag founder Trevor Sehrer, whose day job is in mobile engineering with Google, told me that he plans on doing outreach to form official partnerships with police services soon, after first focusing on building out additional user-facing features. The Finnish Police have already endorsed Lenstag without any prompting, he notes, so it should make sense to start with them. When asked about revenue, however Sehrer demurred.
“I’m much more interested in solving the problem of camera and lens theft with Lenstag than making money,” he said. “The site doesn’t cost a lot of time or money to operate since users only need it when their set of gear changes and the verification system can scale quickly to as many verifiers as I need to get through any backlog.”
He is eventually looking at partnering with insurance providers, but the aim would be to pass on discounts to members of up to 20 percent, not necessarily to make revenue for the site itself.
As a photographer, I find this a very welcome resource, especially given its design and human-powered verification. I can imagine a time when asking for a Lenstag verification will be standard practice when buying and selling used gear, and I’m sure other photographers would appreciate the peace of mind that could come along with that.
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