Creative e-store Fancy preps expansion to Singapore, Taiwan, Japan

Fancy, the US-based social pinboard and e-store for creative gadgets and oddities, looks set to expand and launch in Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan.

Fancy has set up official Twitter accounts for the three nations. @FancyTaiwan, the most talkative of the bunch, popped up yesterday. The American startup has staff and an office in Taiwan, but it’s not clear if the same is true in Singapore and Japan. We’ve reached out to Fancy to learn more.

The site now has bare-bones localised versions in Japanese and Traditional Chinese characters, ripe and ready for e-shoppers in Japan and Taiwan. But all the content is still in English, so it looks pretty beta. Fancy curates quirky designer-oriented content from various other sites such as Amazon, so it’s not guaranteed that an item will be available in all countries – at least not without steep shipping costs.

There’s plenty of competition in this hipster e-commerce sector from sites that work with designers to ship their items, such as Singapore’s Hipvan and Japan’s Monoco. Fab.com has plenty of Asian investment and interest, but has yet to launch in the region.

Fancy is usually compared to Pinterest, as it’s more about curating stuff than actually serving as an e-store. Its $53 million investment this summer values the site at a pie-in-the-sky $600 million.

(Editing by Terence Lee)