I spy sea salt.

We're barreling toward the holidays, and the city's ecommerce companies are putting on the Ritz accordingly. Yesterday, Etsy announced a Soho store for the holidays; today, Birchbox announced the launch of digital popup Birchbox Home. Discovery commerce: Why should you face have all the fun?

Birchbox Home kicks off with a $58 special edition box, packed with kitchen paraphernalia and fancy food samples. Think cocktail napkins and truffle sea salt. Participating brands include Jonathan Adler, Dean and DeLuca and Paperless Post (another Silicon Alley notable). The home box heralds the arrival of a home store, stocked with stuff from C. Wonder and Stonewall Kitchen.

It's a new playing field for Birchbox, which has stuck with cosmetics thus far. What's not entirely clear is how long this new venture will stick around. It's tagged as a popup on the Birchbox site and we're told it's limited edition, but the announcement is framed so one can imagine it becoming a permanent addition:

“We’re dedicated to helping people discover new products and brands, and the debut of Birchbox Home lets us introduce customers to an entirely new group of designers, brand and products,” said Katia Beauchamp, Co-founder of Birchbox.

Not to mention that selling home decor doesn't require battling against the same level of brand loyalty. (Just try talking your grandmother out of her Elizabeth Arden. Not happening.) Maybe higher conversion rates are on Birchbox’s Christmas list!

The Hirschfelds via Coolhunting

Silicon Valley venture capitalists may have chosen the horse they're betting on in the evite game. This morning, VentureWire reported that New York-based Paperless Post* raised $6 million in "first-round funding," from RRE Ventures, Ron Conway's SV Angel, and Tim Draper--making the startup much-better funded than competitors like Punchbowl, which according to FormDs.com raised $1.25 million last December.

Paperless Post was launched here in 2009 by 20-something siblings James and Alexa Hirschfeld. TechCrunch calls it the "anti-Evite" for offering the ability to create sleeker, design-centric personalized invitations. Evite, which was launched in 1998, still has a chunky, clip-art feel to it, whereas Paperless Post's offerings seem to fit better in these modern times. There's even an option that seems ready-made for Brooklyn's nostalgic new artisan-class.

According to TechCrunch, the funding will be used to move its platform into HTML5, which should boost traffic from mobile devices, currently at 30 percent. The Hirschfelds are also looking to build social tools, like calendar integrations. Paperless Post has been growing at 100 percent year-over-year. Perhaps more tellingly, Betabeat received our very first electronic wedding invitation by Paperless Post earlier this year. But that doesn't mean Evite isn't going down without a (clone) fight.

*Disclosure: Paperless Post has previously received funding from Thrive Capital.

A side by side of several e-cards

The startup world is rife with clones and copycats, fueled by the ease of opening up shop on the web. You can find ads on Craigslist shopping for scripts to rip off entire sites. But typically it's the small fry who are aping the success of their larger, more established rivals.

So the folks at New York based Paperless Post were a little taken aback when they saw Postmark, a new offering from Evite, which looked to them like a total clone of their product.

To make their case, Paperless Post laid out for Betabeat the nitty gritty details of the overlap between Postmark and their service. To them, it copied the user experience and design assets, right down to individual cards. Everything had an eerie familiarity, from the pricing scheme to the name.

"We kind of stumbled on it while redesigning our logo," said Alexa Hirschfeld, who founded the site with her brother James. "We were checking out the competitors and when we got to Evite's postmark we had one of those moments, it was actually confusing, looking at it and then at our site, realizing we had been cloned."

Take a minute to watch this video the pair created to highlight the similarities they found.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and Mr. Hirschfeld did say that at first, "We did feel that it was a sign of success, a validation of the direction we are going. People at the beginning thought were foolish, to build something so formal and enriched when everyone was talking about Facebook and the democratization of content."

side by side

But the deeper they dug, the more angry the pair became. The found the pricing schemes for Evite's service to be almost identical, but slightly cheaper than theirs. And they discovered that back in 2007,  Evite threatened to sue a Socializr, another online invitation company,for allegedly copying some of its work. In a letter from its attorneys, Evite accused Socializr of “posting designs and page layouts…that are identical, or strikingly, substantially, or confusingly similar.”

It seemed to the Hirshfelds that Evite was now the one making things confusing. "The name, Postmark, is much closer to our brand than to Evite. And on top of this shocking lack of creativity, Evite says this is a hallmark of their innovative spirit."

The founder say they are exploring their options and considering legal action, but it's a tough road to take on a copycat. That's why VCs are prone to ask, What if Google Does It?, when startups are pitching their business plan. Patents are a good weapon, but tough to get on them on startup time, since the approval process typically takes years. "We plan to just keep evolving the product," said Mr. Hirschfeld. "They are a lot bigger than us, but for now our plan is to just keep beating them on execution."

Evite sent along this statement from President Hans Woolley: “Evite, the categorical leader in online invitations and social planning, has been preparing and executing the launch of Evite Postmark since 2009.  We have done so by deploying our very best talent to create a service that evolves the ad-free premium invitation space beyond where it is now.  Currently, Evite Postmark is in Beta mode and has not been officially launched; it is evolving and we have been thrilled with the response it has received from users (who are mostly from the Evite family) so far.  We are excited to continue to incorporate many new features we are currently developing in anticipation of our official launch in early 2012.”

Disclosure: Paperless Post has received funding from Thrive Capital.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka "The Guy with the Red Tie"), founder of GarysGuide and mentor at ER Accelerator. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.org.

So, it was a busy week. Steve Jobs (who loves black turtlenecks almost as much as I love red ties) resigned. Twenty-five thousand New Yorkers checked into Earthquakepocalypse (and lost some respect with Californians in the process). And Hurricane Irene gave us a few gusts of wind, a few drops of water and a lot of @ElBloombito. But nothing is more important than the upcoming SXSW 2012 Panel Picker deadline (September 2). See, where I come from, we look out for our own. So I've put together a list of panels representing our local New York startuppers. Go show some love and vote for them and email me if you want your panel to be added to the list.

And now, here's whats going on in your neck of the woods this week ...

Use The News! An Introduction to the New York Times API
Zoe Fraade-Blanar (interactive consultant, New York Times and adjunct professor, NYU ITP) will give you the straight-up dope on how to tame the "vast, powerful and a little confusing" monster that is the New York Times data services API.
Monday, 6 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

Ruby for Kids. Sharing with kids how much fun programming is
You know what they say. It's never too early to get them hooked. Just don't be too upset when ur kid whips up a snazzy social app and snags seed funding before you do.
Monday, 6:30 p.m. @ Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street

Outloud.fm - NYC Tech Talks
You can't turn around without bumping into a social music listening startup these days. Following in the smart footsteps of Turntable.fm and Console.fm comes a new one, Outloud.fm. Co-founders Steven Huynh and Mike O'Brien will tell you what its all about and how they built it using node.js and redis.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Meetup HQ, 632 Broadway

PHP is dead: No startups use it... except these awesome ones
Personally I think the start-up world is big enough for everyone, yes, even you Cobol. But if PHP and Ruby want to meet up at the back of the school to duke it out, I'd pay to watch that.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Refinery29, 30 Cooper Square 4th Floor

Producteev and Meetup host Old School Game Night Tourney for Startups
Start-ups. Game Night. Swag. Networking. Hot Dates. Pizza. Cold Beer. Prizes. Co-founders. Charades. Honorary trophy. How can you not like this event?!
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ Meetup HQ, 632 Broadway 3rd Floor

500Startups NYC Demo Day
The place to be to hang out with super angel (errr... micro vc), master of 500 hats and the guy who introduced 'AARRR!!' to the silicon valley vocabulary, Mr. Dave McClure himself. Bonus drinking game--down a sake bomb everytime Mr. McClure can't remember the name of one of his own start-up investments. I kid, I kid :)
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

The Product Group September 2011
It's 2011. Surely you're not still torturing ur friends with Evites, are you? You, dear reader, need Paperless Post. And to learn more about their swoon inducing designs and graphics so-good-you-can-lick-them, come meet up with their product guru, Itai Ram.
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ MTV, 1515 Broadway

Graph Based Machine Learning with Applications to Media Analytics
Social graphs, interest graphs, taste graphs, knowledge graphs. Every start-up worth its salt is dropping the graph bomb in VC meetings and sprinkling it liberally in their pitch decks. But let's be honest. How many of us really know what the heck a graph is? So go chat with Intent Media scientist and former IBM researcher, Lei Ding and get the inside skinny on nodes and routes.
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 6th Floor

Credit Card Processing Basics
No, you won't learn about how to deal with deadbeat clients or what ur start-up business model should be. What you will learn is how to get the dough from a customer who actually wants to pay you. You don't wanna be leaving money on the table, now do you?
Thursday, 8 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

NYC Startup and Dim Sum Enthusiasts Meetup
Cuz startupping + dimsumming is a match made in geek foodie heaven.
Saturday, 10:30 a.m. @ Jing Fong Restaurant, 20 Elizabeth Street

More on the horizon ...
September NY Tech Meetup @ NYU Skirball Center on Sep 6
An Insiders Guide to Angel Investing with Thomas Wisniewski @ General Assembly on Sep 7
Video Hack Day with Shelby.tv @ General Assembly on Sep 10
Open Video Conference @ New York Law School on Sep 10

Until next week. Stay social, my friends!