As a product company, you already know how sales tax works for regular “retail” sales. But when you start selling wholesale, there may be legal, regulatory, or tax issues that you’re not handling correctly. So in this article, we dig into how taxes work with wholesaling, whether you need a wholesale license to sell to stores, what documentation (like exemption certificates) you need to maintain, and other key questions around sales tax for wholesaling.

Yes, your art is meaningful on its own. Yes, your products are tangibly better than others. But ultimately, your story is a key reason that a store owner will choose your line over another. In fact, with all the hullabaloo about Faire accepting international makers (what many US makers read as “cheap stuff coming in from other countries”) this becomes even more important for any maker trying to grow wholesale.

First of all, I hear you. HIRING IS HARD. It’s hard to manage people. It costs money. It takes a huge amount of time to find, vet and train people. You don’t have a big enough studio. You’re an introvert. You have just a small amount of work available. You live in a tiny town. You’re an artist, not a manager. You tried that last year and it didn’t work out.

Today, we’re rounding up some of the most common questions and concerns makers have about wholesale around the holidays. We’re digging into how to approach holiday wholesale as a newbie, how to cultivate orders with current stockists if you’re an old pro, and some simple tips to get orders in the door without a bunch of extra work. As always, though, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. So be sure to “sense check” these answers against what you know to be right for you and your business. 

Your cheat sheet for holiday sales and holiday sanity. It’s for any maker who is trying to get their handmade line into more stores, but without driving themselves insane. We share our biggest learnings, based on watching hundreds of makers grow wholesale over the holiday

Most makers have things in their ordering process that make it a struggle for store owners to understand the line and place an order. Learn a few quick fixes to improve your ordering process today!

Large retailers can provide a level of exposure and sales volume that you simply can’t get any other way. And for some independent brands, one or more sales like this are an important piece of their overall strategy. So we invited three experts with really practical, deep experience to offer their insights about how to take large retailers on successfully.

One of the biggest differences between sane, successful business owners and business owners who are overwhelmed and scraping by is the Bread Baking Test.

Here at Wholesale In a Box, we know that your time is valuable and that keeping on-top of all the latest wholesale marketplace news can be time consuming. You’re so busy managing the ins and outs of your business that sometimes relevant information can slip right by you. So today, we’ve filtered all the recent updates and bring you three wholesale marketplace surprises that may directly impact your day to day operations.

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! 

In June 2023, after 6 years of operations, Tundra, one of the largest online wholesale marketplaces at the time, shuttered its online marketplace. Tundra’s email announcement made some big waves by announcing their intention to file a lawsuit against Faire, while simultaneously promoting their new online wholesale business, Wholesale Co-Op. In the whirlwind that followed, Wholesale Co-Op went belly-up at the end of January 2024. This article reviews the details on both Tundra and Wholesale Co-Op.