Faire

Faire is an online wholesale marketplace headquartered in San Francisco that connects independent retailers with small and independent product brands. Retailers use the platform to discover and purchase merchandise at wholesale prices across categories including home decor, food and drink, apparel, beauty and wellness, jewelry, paper and novelty, kids and baby, pets, men's goods and books, with filters for attributes such as women-owned, LGBTQI+-owned, eco-friendly, organic, handmade, gives-back and "not on Amazon."

The company positions itself as a substitute for the traditional wholesale process, in which retailers travel to in-person trade shows and work with brokers, and in which buying unproven products carries significant inventory risk. Faire applies machine learning to match retailers with products suited to their stores, provides brands with sales, marketing and analytics tools, and offers financial terms — notably net 60 payment terms and free returns on opening orders — that were previously available mainly to large chains.

Sources describe a platform operating at substantial scale: over 100,000 brands and hundreds of thousands of retailers (reported as over 700,000) in more than 70,000 cities across 120 countries, more than 10 million business relationships introduced, and over $8 billion in cumulative brand sales. Faire reported roughly 1,200 employees across nine global offices, with US locations in San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York and Salt Lake City.

Business model

Faire runs a two-sided B2B marketplace. Brands list wholesale products; independent retailers discover and order them online. Faire reduces retailer purchase risk through free returns on opening orders and net 60 payment terms, effectively extending credit and absorbing inventory risk, while giving brands sales, marketing, analytics and logistics tooling (shipping, tracking, returns management) in place of trade shows and sales reps. Growing transaction volume feeds data used to assess pricing, product performance and customer creditworthiness, and network effects compound as each additional retailer attracts more brands and vice versa.