The fallout from Hurricane Sandy is still affecting startups left and right. New York’s Fab.com sent a memo out to customers today saying that it is temporarily halting shipments of packages because its New Jersey-based warehouses are currently without power.
The company’s headquarters in New York’s West Village also remain without power and are closed. CEO Jason Goldberg says that about a dozen Fab employees are, in fact, working from his home right now trying to figure out how to get operations back in swing as soon as possible.
This adds to the storm’s toll on the startup community. Several New York-based media sites like Gawker, Huffington Post and Buzzfeed all went down last night. Not only that, public equity markets are closed today, keeping all of those vested Facebook employees from liquidating part of their holdings because the lock-up dates for rank-and-file employees passed in the last week. Google also cancelled a major Android launch while AllThingsD had to call off a major mobile conference.
Goldberg sent this memo out to customers this afternoon:
Fab HQ. Fab’s headquarters are in the West Village of New York City, at 95 Morton Street. Our offices are 1 block from the Hudson river and our street and building were impacted by the storm. Our office is currently without power and it is closed until further notice. As our offices are on the 5th and 8th floors of the building, we are hopeful that there was no interior damage.
Fab Warehouse. Fab operates out of two warehouses in New Jersey. Both of our warehouses are currently without power and thus are closed. As such, we are unable to ship packages today. We hope to have power restored to our warehouses very soon.
Fab Team. About 1/3 of Fab’s employees are currently without power. The other 2/3’ds of us with power are welcoming those without power into our homes. There’s this beautiful, heart-warming email thread amongst Fab employees called, “Team Together” where team members with power are offering up their homes. It’s special. We’re a Fab Family.
As I write this 12 Fab team members are huddled around my kitchen table working on out recovery plans and our holiday shops. Hotel Betashop (my couch!) is open tonight too!
Fab Website, Apps & Customers. We are doing everything possible to maintain a business-as-usual approach to Fab during these challenging times.
We are launching daily new offerings in the morning and evening, as usual. There are currently 10,000 products on Fab and there will be 1000+ new items added to Fab daily.
We will launch our Holiday Shops on November 1st as previously scheduled.
All Fab packages will ship as soon as humanly possible. Our teams are unloading packages in the warehouse as I write this and shipments will go out ASAP.
I will let everyone know as soon as we have more news. We’re hopeful that power will be restored very soon.
Even in tough times, it helps to smile. We’re all designed to—more than ever.
