As many of you know, the online wholesale marketplace landscape is ever changing. It seems like a new marketplace opens every 6 months.

When marketplaces change focus or shut down, we know brands and makers can be left frustrated, scrambling, and wary of joining yet another marketplace. Which is why we put together some tips on how to move forward and continue your wholesale journey, even when a marketplace closes.

You can have a gorgeous product line, a line sheet you toiled over, a website that’s easy to navigate… but if you make a crucial mistake in your wholesale terms, you will kill the sale before it can happen. This article explores 5 mistakes you might be making in your wholesale terms… and easy fixes for each.

There are a lot of different options for presenting your product line to retailers. You can use your Faire storefront… you can use an online tool like Candid… or of course you can create a PDF document like a line sheet or a catalog. 

There are pros and cons to the different approaches but if you do decide to create a PDF line sheet or catalog, you probably know that it can be time-consuming to set up. We provide a lot of guidance in the Wholesale In a Box course as to what should be in the line sheet… but until now, we hadn’t provided an actual template you could edit, use, and hit the ground running. 

So we’re happy to share that as a bonus to Wholesale In a Box, you’ll now get a Line Sheet / Catalog Template… for free! 

When you’re a maker growing your wholesale business, the crowd of new wholesale marketplaces can feel bewildering. One maker says she thrived on Faire, while another tells horror stories of stolen stockists. Some makers put their line on every marketplace while others grow wholesale without using marketplaces at all. Each marketplace has different advantages, disadvantages, and risks.

In coaching with makers, I’ve reviewed hundreds of Shopify sites in terms of their aesthetics and function. But until this year, I had never actually built one! 

Recently, I started working on a new project that required creating a Shopify site. And as you probably know, it’s technically straightforward but can be daunting once you realize how many steps and decisions are actually involved. I knew I didn’t want to commit the funds to paying someone to create the website for me… but I also did not want to spend more of my time on it than I needed to. 

As you probably know, we’re in constant dialogue with our Wholesale In a Box makers about their questions, concerns, and new opportunities on the horizon. We combine these insights with our own observations of how the wholesale community is shifting and changing. And we synthesize all of that into a docket of course updates and changes that we do in batches.

As new wholesale marketplaces pop up, it can be hard to sort out the real opportunities from the time-wasters. As you know, we’ve done profiles of all the key marketplaces (starting with Faire of course.) But JuniperMarket LINK, one of the newest entrants to the space holds real promise. JuniperMarket’s key differences are its focus on home goods and furniture, certainly – but they also have an interesting showroom component that may just prove to be a truly new offering.

When considering wholesale marketplaces there is no shortage of options these days. Many of the marketplaces are similar but small differences can mean large impacts on makers and independent brands. In this article we review a newer wholesale marketplace, Creoate, and give you the information you need to decide if it’s a good fit for your wholesale strategy.

Our guide to making quick, affordable changes to your wholesale line sheet — for makers and small product lines.

Honest reviews of Faire from makers and small product companies, tips for succeeding on Faire Wholesale, and the key things you need to know to use Faire to grow wholesale.

Today we’re answering a common maker question that seems simple but trips a lot of makers up: Should I use a newsletter-style email or a personal email to keep in touch with my stockists? There are certainly pros and cons to each method, so we’ll take them one at a time. 

Many times, a maker comes to us with a beautiful product and an incredible production process but their photos are just not great. They’re a little dark, slightly blurry, the setup isn’t ideal, and the spirit of the product itself isn’t coming through. Or sometimes the mechanics of the photos are good, but there’s no beauty to them, nothing really compelling -- the pieces feel dead and uninteresting.