Startups rise and fall. It’s the natural order of the new circle of tech life. However, it’s not so often that a proven name in getting ideas off the ground fails to make headway with a business that most agreed had as much promise as its creator could muster himself.
However, two anonymous sources have told Re/code that Bezar, the online marketplace founded and run by Fab.com Cofounder Bradford Shellhammer, is quickly running out of cash and has no new funding rounds in sight at the moment. The last publicly available round of funding to Bezar occurred in early 2015 for $2.25 million, and it’s unlikely investors would commit anything more than that to prop up the marketplace in this eCommerce landscape.
Shellhammer denied a chance to comment to Re/code on the rumors, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire in the Amazon-killer startup marketplace space. After Jet.com’s ignominious rise and continuous up-and-down fall, it seems like there are a million unseen hurdles to starting any new kind of online marketplace these days, even one that includes curated content from known designers and pop-up shops to draw in recurring customers with more eclectic tastes than what mass-market sellers can provide.
“ECommerce sucks,” Shellhammer told Fast Company in an Oct. 2015 interview. “Amazon is so effective; it’s so easy. But you don’t go to Amazon.com to get inspired about how you’re going to decorate your apartment. You don’t look at Amazon the way you look at Instagram. And I want to create a shopping experience that’s equal parts inspiring and something that you can buy. I look less at any other retailer, and I look at Instagram and Pinterest, because I really want us to position ourselves as something like that.”
Unfortunately, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry — and doubly so in retail.
