# Faire: The Wholesale Channel Nobody Talks About **Author:** Robert Parr **Date:** 2026-08-14 **Description:** Independent shops were ordering squishies six weeks before the press noticed. That instinct runs through a $3 billion wholesale channel, and getting onto those shelves comes down to one carton. **URL:** https://thrive3pl.com/blog/faire-wholesale-channel-nobody-talks-about --- > **TL;DR:** Wholesale means a whole lot more than indifferent chain store buyers with complicated routing guides. Independent shops found the squishy toy trend about six weeks before the press did, and they did the same thing with mahjong sets and Dubai chocolate. That instinct is the product Faire sells: a wholesale marketplace where more than 100,000 brands reach hundreds of thousands of small retailers, moving nearly $3 billion a year. Getting onto those shelves starts with one opening order, and because Faire eats the return risk on it, the shop takes no chance at all. In late 2025 a toy called the NeeDoh Advent Calendar went viral on TikTok, and squishies became the thing every kid wanted. The interesting part is not the trend, but rather, who saw it first. Faire tracks what independent retailers search for and order on its wholesale marketplace. Searches and orders for squishy toys spiked roughly six weeks before mainstream press picked up the story. Thousands of shops stocked them at the same time, weeks ahead of the coverage. They keep doing it, too. When mahjong blew up on social media, the number of Faire retailers carrying mahjong products rose 39%. Dubai chocolate showed the same shape: retailer counts on Faire surged 565% by August 2024, months before the TODAY show covered it and a full year before Lindt shipped its own version. There is a layer of American retail that finds things early, buys in small quantities, and puts a product on a shelf where a customer can experience it for the first time. A hundred thousand brands already sell into it, yet most ecommerce entrepreneurs have never considered it for their own brands. ## Wholesale Also Means the Shop on Main Street Most brand owners would love to see their products on retail shelves. However, the objective seems too daunting to even begin to tackle. For many, "wholesale" just seems to mean: - indifferent (and hard to contact) buyers at national big box retailers - routing guides written in a language nobody offers to translate - an EDI connection you have to build before anyone will take an order - a vendor agreement thick enough to need a lawyer - chargebacks waiting on the first mislabeled pallet - pallet quantities a growing brand cannot produce yet That version of wholesale is certainly real, and Thrive helps run it every day for brands shipping into stores like Academy, Ace Hardware, Dick's Sporting Goods, Home Depot, Kroger, Lowe's, Scheels, Target, Walmart, and many more. With that said, the version of "wholesale" that grew this year belongs to the proprietor's shop, not the big boxes in the suburban strip malls. This is where a marketplace like Faire comes in. Faire connects more than 100,000 brands to hundreds of thousands of independent retailers. In June 2026 the company reported that those brands and shops transacted nearly $3 billion in wholesale volume in one year. Unlike the big box process, in this marketplace nobody schedules a buyer's meeting. A shop owner browses product listings online, orders a case pack, and puts your product next to forty others. For an online-first brand, the mechanics here represent familiar ground. You build a listing, write the copy, shoot the photos, set your minimums, and orders arrive in an inbox with a label to print. It is closer to running a Shopify storefront than to landing a retail account. The difference is who is buying and how much: a store rather than a consumer, ordering by the case. ## Growing Markets the Big Boxes Miss Faire published its first Independent Retail Report in July 2026. The company compared the same 130,000-plus shops across 20 countries in Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, so its growth figures measure stores buying more rather than a platform adding stores. **Every category the report tracks grew.** Retailer spending on Kids and Baby rose 166% against the same quarter a year earlier, carried by plush and those squishies. Books came second at 41% and Apparel third at 36%. The same year saw 8,270 US store closures across national chains, including Dollar Tree, Macy's and Joann's Fabrics. Meanwhile, independent shops on Faire went the other way. On Faire, 59% of brick-and-mortar retailers increased their wholesale purchasing. The typical physical or multi-channel store spent about 19% more year over year, roughly 2.2 times the growth of the typical online-only store at 9%. Physical retail did not merely hold. It outgrew the internet-only shops on the same platform, by better than two to one. Faire found its fastest-growing independent retailers in small cities and towns rather than the big metros: Auburn, Alabama. Augusta, Georgia. Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Williamsburg, Virginia. In other words, the shop that finds your brand first is more likely to sit on a main street in Norman, Oklahoma than in downtown Chicago. ## Faire's Early Adopters The report identified a category of retailer it calls "Scouts." To earn this label, a shop has to place first-ever orders with at least three brands new to it in a single quarter, and at least two of those brands have to be under a year old on Faire. These are not hobbyists gambling with rent money. Faire found that Scouts skew toward the established and high volume end of their buyers. These are the long-standing local landmarks who have earned the trust of their communities over decades, or even generations. These are the shops where customers go to be surprised and inspired by the latest products and designs. They also cluster in states a national buyer rarely visits. Scouts make up 19.3% of active retailers in Mississippi, 19.2% in North Dakota and 19% in Maine, with Oklahoma, Alaska, Louisiana and Hawaii close behind. Nevada comes in at 12.2%, alongside Wyoming, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Faire put it bluntly: "It is not the coastal trend cities doing the most discovering." The retailers most willing to bet on an unknown brand typically reside outside of California, New York, and New Jersey. Four brands in the report show what happens when the Scouts pick something up. Imports of handmade Italian leather accessories grew 571%. Finnish bat and bee houses, made for conservationists and garden lovers, rose 423%. Irish artisanal chocolates gained 233% among American candy shops. Moroccan handwoven bags and baskets grew 214% and reached 592 US stores. Every one of those began with a handful of shopkeepers looking at a listing and deciding their customers would like it. ## Landing the Opening Order on Faire When a retailer discovers you on Faire, the first order is typically just a small one to test whether your product will actually resonate with that store's customers. Faire offers free returns on that opening order, with a prepaid label and a window of about 60 days. In Faire's own words to brands: "Faire takes on that return risk, not the brand. Every order we send you is a guaranteed sale." For the shopkeeper, trying an unknown brand risks nothing. If the product does not sell, she sends it back and Faire absorbs it. For the brand, that guarantee removes every reason for her to hesitate. ## Case Pack Fulfillment Is a Different Job With the order in hand, the challenge now turns toward fulfillment. A DTC pick line handles one unit going to one address. The pickers move fast, the pack station suits small parcels, and a mistake costs you one unhappy customer. A wholesale order changes almost every variable at once: - **The unit of pick is the case, not the each.** A shop ordering six units of four SKUs wants them counted, verified and packed together, and a picker trained on singles builds that order slowly and checks it twice. - **Pre-packs travel as sets.** An apparel pre-pack is a size run that ships complete. Break it and the order is wrong even when the piece count is right. - **Volume arrives in clumps.** Wholesale clusters around buying seasons and market weeks rather than spreading evenly across a month, so the labor plan has to flex. - **The carton is part of the product.** A DTC parcel needs to survive a truck. A wholesale carton needs to arrive looking like something a shop owner wants to open on her sales floor. - **Kitting shows up early.** Displays, counter units and multi-SKU assortments are ordinary in wholesale, and [kitting and assembly](/blog/kitting-and-assembly-services-for-ecommerce-brands) is production work. Your pack bench has to stop shipping orders to do it. None of that is hard in a warehouse built for it. All of it disrupts a warehouse that runs singles all day and then has to do both on the same floor on the same afternoon. We wrote about that split in more depth in [B2B versus DTC fulfillment](/blog/b2b-vs-dtc-fulfillment-key-operational-differences-for-ecommerce-brands). ## One Inventory Pool, Two Very Different Appetites Another challenge has nothing to do with Faire specifically and breaks more wholesale relationships than any other. A brand sells the same SKU on its own store and on a wholesale channel, holds one pool of inventory, and lets the two race each other to it. A DTC customer buys one unit. A wholesale buyer takes forty-eight. When both draw from an unsynced pool, you oversell your hero SKU to the boutique you spent a year courting, and the apology costs more than the order. This is the [integration problem](/blog/essential-integrations-for-multi-channel-sellers) with a sharper edge, because a short-shipped wholesale order damages a relationship rather than just a single transaction. You must have a plan and system in place to deal with this. Allocate inventory by channel, or run one live pool with real-time deduction across both. Either works. Relying on somebody checking a spreadsheet once a day is what breaks. ## Where You Go From Here If you already sell on Faire and pack those cartons yourself, you can clearly keep doing it, because you have been. The question is what those hours cost you during a busy season, and what one short-shipped opening order costs when a shop quietly stops reordering. If you are not on Faire and you make something a boutique would put on a shelf, give the channel an afternoon. Wholesale demand there is growing fastest among physical stores in small towns, the platform carries the return risk on a shop's first order with you, and none of it requires the EDI connections and routing guides a national retail account demands. Both roads end at the same place. Somewhere out there is a shop owner in New Orleans who is about to take a chance on you, and she will decide whether to do it again based on what she finds when she cuts the tape to open your first shipment. Make that carton count. That is what [B2B and wholesale fulfillment](/fulfillment/b2b) is at Thrive. [Get a quote](/quote) and bring your Faire order history with you. --- **Sources:** [Faire Independent Retail Report, July 2026](https://www.faire.com/news/faire-independent-retail-report-july-22-2026) — balanced panel of 130,000+ retailers across 20 countries, Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025, for category growth, physical versus online-only growth, Scouts, the trend timing, the exception brands and the small-town findings; [Faire newsroom, June 2026](https://www.faire.com/news/faire-opens-its-wholesale-platform-to-millions-of-business-use-buyers) for annual wholesale volume; Faire's announcement of the report, 22 July 2026, for the Sun Belt cities including Norman, Oklahoma; [Coresight Research's US Store Tracker](https://coresight.com/research/us-store-tracker-extra-store-openings-and-closures-2025-review-and-2026-outlook/), cited by Faire, for the 8,270 US store closures; [faire.com](https://www.faire.com/about) for brand and retailer counts; Faire Help Center on [retailer terms](https://www.faire.com/support/articles/360018414552) and [returns](https://www.faire.com/support/articles/360002924031). --- *Published by Thrive 3PL — Houston-based fulfillment for e-commerce brands. Learn more at [thrive3pl.com](https://thrive3pl.com).*