Online furniture store Hem goes live in Europe and USA

Fab.com announced today it has officially launched Hem, an online retailer selling Scandinavian-style furniture. The European design company goes live in 40 markets. It ships to 30 countries, including the US, and a further ten countries will have Hem’s furniture thanks to resale partnerships with physical stores.

Hem, which is the Swedish word for ‘Home’, offers preorders for more than two dozen products. All products have been designed, built and shipped in-house. “Hem is the brand and company I have been dying to launch for a couple of years now”, CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg tells TechCrunch. “I became fascinated with the opportunities and potential in online furniture from the beginning of Fab.”

This is shown by the acquisition of furniture seller MassivKonzept in 2013, the investments in building out a private label furniture business and the acquisition of One Nordic, three months ago. Fab.com then also revealed its plan to focus solely on original home furnishings in Europe.

Welcome to Hem. Now open for pre-orders. https://t.co/8C2TXzguBF #hemishere pic.twitter.com/i0eedUhIv2

— Hem (@tweetsfromhem) September 30, 2014

Investing in making their own products
With Hem, Fab.com is focusing more on original goods as its sells a new line of customizable furniture and products. This decision didn’t happen overnight and was made with a reason, as Goldberg told TechCrunch. “When you are selling third-party products and the margins are very low and customer expectations are very high, it was not a model you could execute successfully, not a model where we liked to operate. We’ve seen a lot of others that stalled as well. There are very few really successful very large commerce players who are selling other people’s products at this point. So we decided we wanted to invest in making our own products and being full stack.” During October it’s possible to pre-order items at the online Hem store. The configured products, which customers can design themselves, will be delivered after 8-12 weeks after ordering.

We gave our team 100 days to launch the next great online design brand. Say hello to Hem. It’s now day 1. https://t.co/6D1QZ5btT8.

— Jason Goldberg (@betashop) September 30, 2014