There’s no real brick-and-mortar analog for what they are building, and no quantifiable data set to determine the objects they pick. They simply look for beauty and color and style.

They drive the selection based more on emotion than data. They refused to make any decisions around what sold well for the first three months of the business, trusting their guts that if they love what they’re selecting, shoppers– or “readers”– will too. That isn’t an etailer. That’s Anna Wintour. “We needed to just let it develop,” says Goldberg. “We wanted people to look forward to opening the email and reading the site, no matter what they bought.”

Added Shellhammer, “We do what a good editor does. We take stuff and put it together in a way that creates something new.” They’re selling a lifestyle that cuts across categories.

The difference was pronounced in a recent meeting Goldberg had with a Valley-based recruit for a technical position. Within in ten minutes of the interview the two were fighting. Goldberg asked what he’d do with the Fab homepage, and the recruit gave the usual spiel about A/B testing the layout to see which products made people click more, and how the data said they should be laid out on the page. He called the product placements on the front page “ads,” and Goldberg balked. They aren’t ads, he said, they’re editorial. “We aren’t trying to make people buy certain things, we want to guide them through a story,” he says.

The approach is clearly resonating.