Stockists Have to Trust You Or They Won’t Order

Relationships — whether friendships or store owner relationships — are mysterious, multifactorial things. There's real art, magic, and randomness in how they develop and whether they last.

But some of the well-known metaphors for keeping a relationship healthy over time turn out to be surprisingly useful reminders, especially when it comes to relationships with store owners.

First, a reminder of two core truths of wholesale that are easy to lose track of:

1. Wholesale success depends on reorders. The excitement of a first order can be misleading, because it's the reorders that actually make wholesale work: they turn an unprofitable opening order into a profitable long-term relationship, they prove the work is genuinely selling in a shop (which builds visibility and momentum), and they give you predictable income you can actually plan around. On Faire, this matters even more, since reorder rate feeds directly into the platform's visibility algorithm and Top Shop status, and new orders now carry an extra $10 charge that reorders don't.

2. Reorders come from relationships. For the most part, store owners buy from you long-term because they have a relationship with you. Sure, there are exceptions — we've all got some random store on Faire that keeps buying even though we've never actually interacted with them. But those are rare. The vast majority of your repeat sales come because a store owner feels connected to you, your brand, your products, and your story.

So if wholesale depends on reorders, and reorders depend on relationships — how do we actually build relationships with store owners?

The great philosopher of our time, Brené Brown, gave a talk on the anatomy of trust that resonated with me (and reminded me of Stephen Covey's relationship bank account framework). The full text is worth reading but two of the key insights are:

Relationships are built on trust.

There may be other ingredients to wanting a relationship with someone, but if you don't trust them, the relationship can't continue. What's fascinating is that this holds as true for store owners as it does for friends or spouses. Faire even tries to quantify this by letting your operational metrics affect your ranking and visibility. Beyond that, I hear it from store owners all the time when they decide not to continue with a line. They may not use the word "trust," but they'll talk about poor communication, broken shipments, products that won't sell. All different ways of saying: "I don't trust this business owner and brand to support my shop in thriving."

Building trust isn't as mystical as you might think.

As she puts it, trust is built in very small moments. She offers a metaphor where a relationship is like a jar of marbles: every trustworthy action adds a marble, and every broken trust takes one away. If the jar gets too low, the relationship ends.

I think this is a great metaphor for the stockist relationship too. Each stockist relationship is its own jar. You can do things that add marbles to an individual jar — and you can build systems or routines that go around adding marbles to every jar at once. It's also a good reminder that you don't have to do this perfectly. The goal isn't to never lose a marble or never make a mistake. It's to make sure that, on balance, you're adding more than you're taking away.

How to Build Trust with Stockists and Store Owners Who Buy From You

Things that take away marbles:

• Not responding to emails, or responding slowly

• A store owner feeling disconnected from you or your story

• Legalese or overly formal, impersonal communication

• Issues with a shipment — wrong items, damaged goods, missed ship dates

• Sporadic communication – very frequent emails followed by silence for instance

• Surprise price increases or policy changes with no notice

• Inconsistent product quality between orders

• Going quiet after a problem instead of addressing it

Things that add marbles:

• Remembering their preferences — the spelling of their name, packaging preferences, how they like to be contacted

• Being a human being they feel connected to and inspired by

• Being reliably and predictably present — consistent restocks, consistent communication

• Following up after an order to see how it's selling, not just to sell more

• Owning mistakes quickly and making them right without a fight

• Sharing consistently about your story and process so they feel connected and like they can speak to your line to customers

None of this requires a grand gesture. Trust isn't built in one perfect interaction — it's built in the accumulation of small, ordinary ones. Every email you answer, every interesting newsletter email you send, every shipment that arrives on time, every small preference you remember, is a marble in the jar. Keep enough jars full, and the reorders (and the business built on them) take care of themselves.

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