Pinterest rival Fancy was rumored to be in acquisition talks with Apple, but that outcome is sounding more distant today because the startup has raised a big, new round of funding instead. According to a new SEC filing, Fancy has raised just over $26 million in additional funding from investors which include Allen & Co‘s LeRoy Kim, Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, PPR’s Franscois-Henri Pinault, and Edward Gilligan, Vice Chairman of American Express.

Also listed on the filing are Fancy co-founders Joe and Jack Einhorn.

Fancy had previously raised $18 million in outside funding.

Some of these names should not be a surprise – the lead investor in Fancy’s $10 million round from November 2011 came from outside the Valley: PPR, the $25 billion French firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns some of the biggest fashion brands in the world, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Through its relationship with Fancy, high fashion sites like Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and others, now have social commerce integrations courtesy of the service.

Dorsey and Pallotta were also involved in Fancy’s $6 million Series A round from 2010, and LeRoy Kim was previously listed as a Fancy Board Member, thanks to Allen & Co.’s participation in Fancy’s angel round.

The company, in fact, is known for having a lineup of impressive backers. Other investors include top VCs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (as individuals), General Catalyst, Esther Dyson,  MTV creator Bob Pittman, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Eric Eisner, Jeff Samberg, and Ashton Kutcher.

This August, the company was reportedly in talks with Apple about an acquisition deal, but either that deal fell through, talks are ongoing and Fancy is just extending its runway, or the original reports were inaccurate.

For those unfamiliar, Fancy is often thought of as a high-end Pinterest rival, but the focus of the service has always been one of a more of a transactional nature. The startup offers a commerce marketplace, which lets merchants and brands use a self-serve platform to upload their own images and associated deals, or they can tap into the demand for their products generated by the site. Fancy’s users are able to “shop” the images. Instead of clicking through to an external website, they’re shown the option to purchase the item in question (or in the case of exotic scenes, a hotel room, perhaps) from Fancy itself. This greatly differs from Pinterest, which tends to be more about “inspirational” imagery, not buying.

The company has also experimented with other forms of e-commerce, including a group gift giving platform, subscription-based commerce with its “Fancy Box” offering, “buy” buttons for fashion bloggers, a cashback promotion with Amex, and more.

We’ve reached out to the company for additional details, but Fancy COO Michael Silverman declined to provide immediate confirmation or comment without first talking to the CEO or other executives. Unfortunately, because of the company’s NYC location, folks at the company are difficult to reach today due to evacuations related to the hurricane. We’ll update when we have the official word.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week, New York-based The Fancy, a Pinterest-like site with a focus on not just browsing, but buying from its collection of inspirational imagery, began encouraging users to share its content on social networks in exchange for cash rewards. But paid promotion via social sharing was only one part of the company’s larger plan. Today, the company is rolling out another piece of the puzzle and is introducing “Buy” buttons to power purchasing behaviors on any website.

The “Buy” button is targeted at bloggers and other publishers, not online merchants or e-commerce sites, of course. It should be especially appealing to the large and growing community of fashion bloggers, who frequently post images of clothing and accessories like those that you also find on The Fancy. And it gives them another way to monetize their sites beyond using text-based or banner advertisements.

The Fancy is working closely with the Independent Fashion Bloggers network at launch, which represents over 30,000 writers. According to editor Taylor Davies, the button could end up being “the next step in how we, as blog consumers, shop and purchase things we like and see,” she says. The advantage of this button, Davies thinks, is that it allows users to make purchases from the site without leaving the page. (Checkout pops up in a window on the site itself, similar to what 72Lux currently offers – see screenshot below for an example).

The connection to the fashion industry is one of The Fancy’s key strengths, in fact, as one of its big investors is PPR, the $25 billion firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns major fashion brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Because of that relationship, several high fashion sites now sport Fancy’s social commerce integrations, including Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and others. The company also partnered with Oscar de la Renta earlier this year to sell an item from the designer’s spring collection, and saw $10,000 worth of the shirts sold in the first week.

Working the e-commerce angle is a major differentiating factor for The Fancy, which offers merchants a way to sell via the site, and its rival Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest backer Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, recently alluded to The Fancy’s movements in this area with a thinly veiled hint of disdain, telling Forbes, “there are so many copycats of Pinterest already who are focusing just on shopping but they are not getting as much attraction as Pinterest because they are too commercial.” That may be true for some users, but success stories like Fab.com, for example, do prove there’s potential in social commerce. And on The Fancy, it’s growing. In May, its platform was seeing $50,000 a week in commerce. That number is now $75,000, Michael Silverman, Fancy COO tells me. The site also has a million users who “fancy” items over 500,000 times per day.

“Many people say they do social shopping, but nobody does it as extensively as we do,” The Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn told TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis yesterday at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley conference, where Einhorn, Pinault and the Fancy board member Jack Dorsey were all in attendence. Allen & Co is a major investor in The Fancy.

Publishers will be able to implement the button on their site using a single line of Javascript code. Once installed, Fancy pays the bloggers 2% of the purchase price to their Fancy account, 30 days after shipping – the same as with the affiliate links introduced earlier this week.

The new “Buy” button should be made available on the company’s website shortly, alongside the other widgets and buttons The Fancy currently offers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 worth of commerce through its service each week. To help further grow its shopping platform, which initially debuted in February of this year, the company has also updated its iOS application. The app doesn’t just support browsing and liking images (you “fancy” things, actually) as before, but adds the ability to purchase items directly from the app itself.

The Fancy, (or just “Fancy,” as it’s sometimes called), at first glance, seems to be just another Pinterest-like image-sharing site. But there are several key differences between the two social services. For starters, while Pinterest skews heavily female, Fancy reports a more even split – at the beginning of the year, around 60% of its users were male, in fact. Today, it’s about 55% male to 45% female.

The company has also been more focused on commerce from the get-go, instead of trying to figure it out after the fact. On Fancy, participating merchants (there are now 2,000, up from 400 in February) can claim a post as the only one who can sell against it on a first-come, first-serve basis, following light vetting. That means they could sell their own product, if that’s the image which happens to be trending, or they can use the popular image to promote a related product or offering. (e.g. Beautiful hotel shot? Book a trip; Awesome concept watch? This is similar, buy it now). Plans for a more Google-like bidding system is in the works.

The company has several impressive backers, including top VCs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Allen & Co., General Catalyst, Esther Dyson, Celtics owner Jim Pallotta, MTV creator Bob Pittman, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Eric Eisner, Jeff Samberg, and Ashton Kutcher. Another big investor is PPR, the $25 billion French firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns some of the biggest fashion brands in the world, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Through that relationship, high fashion sites now have social commerce integrations courtesy of Fancy, including Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and others.

More recently, the company partnered with Oscar de la Renta, which debuted a t-shirt from its spring collection on the site, and sold over $10,000 worth in the first week. That’s only five t-shirts ($2,499 ea.) but still, the movement managed to surprise Oscar de la Renta chief exec Alex Bolen. Now, says Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn, the company is poised to announce partnerships between some of the biggest names in fashion for an event around the upcoming fashion week.

Fancy is also growing quite a bit, up from 250,000 registered users fancying 1 million+ products per week in February to 1 million users fancying items 3 million times per week today.

The new iOS apps (iPhone and iPad) are out now. In addition to the social commerce features, they also offer a redesigned user interface and even a new icon. You can grab the apps from here in iTunes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch