Fab went through a tough 2013. The design startup went through multiple rounds of layoffs, reduced its overseas operations and lost some of its top executives, including cofounder Bradford Shellhammer (above left).
Now that it's a new year, Fab's CEO Jason Goldberg (above right) is trying to own up to some of his mistakes with a blog post rounding up some of the lessons he learned last year.
See also: 2013's Top Winners and Losers in Tech
"No doubt, we had lost perspective at Fab," Goldberg writes in the post, referring to the company's billion-dollar valuation and press coverage. "We had started to dream in billions when we should have been focused on making one day simply better than the one before it."
Goldberg admitted that this focus on growing the company impacted his judgment and the judgment of those on his team.
"By championing growth on the one hand while questioning efficiency on the other, all I was doing was confusing the team, not leading them," he writes. "And, everyone — including myself — was too busy focusing on growth to even take the proper time to figure out the tough problems in front of us."
Along the way, he says the company lost touch with what is supposed to be its central focus: featuring quality designed products.
"I realized that we were no longer smelling the design coffee at Fab," he writes. "I asked our team to take a count of all of the products we were selling on Fab that they were not proud of. The count came to more than $1M in inventory value. Imagine that — we had allowed ourselves to take on more than $1M of inventory that we were not proud of."
For all those reasons, he says the company chose to focus on "strengthening the foundation," which included consolidating operations, rather than "pursuing rapid growth."
Even so, the tough times may not be over yet for Fab. Just before the blog post went up, another report surfaced that Fab continues to wind down its European business.
Image: Stephen Lovekin/Getty