But in reality? With this pivot, Fab isn’t completely changing its product as much as it is changing what the Fab brand means. Instead of selling merchandise from other retailers on its site through flash sales (sales of limited quantities of items for limited time periods), Fab is expanding to include products designed by Fab, products designed by others, and ventures like custom furniture and a brick and mortar store in Europe. The company wants to be one of the “next great iconic shopping brands,” it wrote Tuesday, and that shopping experience will maintain the design focus that the company was founded on.

Goldberg explained the idea behind the re-launch, which he announced in a blog post Tuesday:

“People called it a “pivot.” We called it a complete restart. We threw out the old and started anew. And it took off fast. Really fast. We re-launched Fab on June 9, 2011 and before we knew it we were tracking to $100M in sales and working with tens of thousands of designers and connecting with millions of consumers. We were on to something big. We knew it. So, in January 2012 we did what came naturally to us: We planned to Pivot. Again.”

Focusing on the general concept of a design-based e-commerce brand will allow Fab to both produce its own products and work with others, expanding the items it sells on its site and expanding the concept of what it means to be a physical retailer, the company wrote:

“We believe that part of disrupting design is disrupting it across multiple channels. We’re working on Fab store concepts that reimagine and reinvent how people buy design products by merging offline & online experiences in entirely new ways. We’ve always said that Fab wants to be where its customers are — be it smartphone, tablets, web browsers, or even physical retail stores. And, with less than 5% of home products purchased online today, we think that physical retail has an important role to play in the customer’s decision process. But, we plan to reinvent retail and help guide home product purchased online to 10%, then 20%, then 30% online as part of our disrupting the industry.”

As part of the expansion, Fab is also acquiring MassivKonzept, a custom furniture company, which will give Fab a head-start on this business and the addition of a physical store, with plans to add more of these stores in the future.

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German media has reported that the site, which was launched by the brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator and operated across a number of European countries, will be shutting down immediately as the investors switch their focus. It’s a swift execution for the site, which caused Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg to angrily label it a “complete rip-off” when it appeared in January — copying not just Fab’s business model, but also the site’s design.

But even though Bamarang is being shut down, it won’t be going away exactly.

According to conversations reported by Deutsche Startups, the energy that went into Bamarang is now being transferred to WestWing, another Rocket-funded entity focused on home decor sales that recently took $50 million in funding.

“We have decided to concentrate on WestWing’s business model, where we have established clear No1 positions in key markets like Germany, Brazil, Italy and Russia,” said WestWing founder Stefan Smalla.

“As a consequence we will phase out Bamarang and focus 100 percent of our resources on WestWing, which we see as the stronger of the two business models. This will allow us to build unassailable market positions in the emerging home and living e-commerce market, and deploy our substantial new funding on the largest growth opportunities.”

German startup site Gruenderszene reports that most of the staff of Bamarang are expected to move to WestWing, with many staff taking part in interviews on Monday to help decide their fate.

Anyone thinking this says anything about the death of cloning should beware, however — not least because WestWing is a copycat of the flash sales site OneKingsLane. Ultimately, it looks like a hard-headed business decision from one of the most hard-headed investing teams around: Bamarang faced too much competition, but WestWing is having an easier ride of it, so they decided to follow the money.

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“Design is a universal language. It’s a lifestyle,” the company said on its blog. “Great design exists in every country and in every region of the world. An essential part of our vision is to help people everywhere benefit from great design.”

Less than a year after its launch last June, Fab is on track to become something of a phenomenon. The site, which attracted 1.5 million users in its first six months, is nearing 4 million members today, said CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg at Business Insider’s Startup 2012 conference today.

Given the recent buzz around the value of design and the beautification of the web (think Facebook Timeline, the Path re-launch and, of course, Instagram), Fab’s mission is very on trend. But Goldberg said the dual drivers behind Fab’s growth are social and mobile. About 50 percent of Fab’s membership comes from social sharing (about 20-40 percent of daily referrals are from Facebook and 2 percent are from Pinterest), he said. Ahead of its conference, Business Insider reported that 35 to 40 percent of Fab.com’s traffic comes from mobile apps.

And, recent stats on repeat purchase rates suggest that Fab is building a strong community. About 50 percent of members make a second purchase, and about one third of members make a third purchase, Goldberg said. The company said repeat purchasers make up two-thirds of each week’s purchases.

This year, the company is expected to make upwards of $100 million in revenue, and Goldberg said it can be profitable in the U.S. whenever it chooses. However, he added, that won’t be this year.

For now, he said, their focus is on building a long-term business and making Fab synonymous with design. But, he acknowledged that Fab’s mission wasn’t always so clear.

Before launching the current version of Fab, he and his co-founder spent a year trying to launch a gay social network. They raised $2 million and tried creating a product that would work. But when they realized that they weren’t succeeding — and weren’t having fun to boot — they wasted little time switching gears. They had an hour-long conversation with each board member, a 20-minute board meeting formalizing the decision and, the very next day, they shut down their original site.

Goldberg’s ultimate lesson to entrepreneurs: “If you spend a year on something and you haven’t figured it out, move on to something else… You can’t iterate your way to a business model.”

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