Your Wholesale Data Is Telling You Something – Here’s How to Listen
As a small business owner, you often feel like you're doing a lot with very little — flying an airplane held together with duct tape and popsicle sticks. And sometimes that's true. But there's one area where makers almost always have more than they realize: your wholesale order history.
If you have even a modest history of wholesale orders - on Faire, through your own site, or just a spreadsheet you've been keeping - you have what you need to make a real leap forward in your wholesale growth. The analysis is simple. You're looking for two groups of stores.
The first is your Best Buyers: the retailers who, when you look at total order volume over time, are generating a disproportionate share of your wholesale revenue. This group is almost always smaller than people expect. In wholesale, it's common for 20% of your accounts to represent 80% of your sales. Most sellers have a vague sense of who their good accounts are, but there's a difference between a vague sense and actually knowing.
The second group is what I call Cooling Off stores: retailers who ordered from you more than once (which is significant, because a reorder means your product actually sold in their shop) but haven't placed an order in the past several months. These stores had real momentum with your line at some point. When they stop ordering, it’s important to pay attention. Some of them are absolutely recoverable, and even the ones that aren't can teach you something.
Here's what you actually do with those lists.
With your Best Buyers, the first move is to make sure you know who they are, in detail — not just as a line in a spreadsheet, but as actual stores. Pull up their website. Find their Instagram. Get a sense of their customer, their vibe, and what else they carry. Then look across the group: what do these stores have in common? Location, price point, the kind of product mix they carry? The more clearly you can see what makes your best accounts your best accounts, the easier it becomes to find more stores that look just like them (which is crucial if you’re doing any active outreach.) It also allows you to make absolutely sure that you’re engaging these shops regularly, which is very important.
With your Cooling Off stores, the goal is a warm, low-pressure check-in. You can ask if they need anything, offer a sample of a new product, or just check in on a human level. Some of these stores ran out of your product and forgot to reorder. Some had a problem they never mentioned. Some have shifted their focus and aren't coming back, but will tell you something useful if you ask. You won't recover all of them, and that's okay. The ones you do recover more than justify the effort, and the ones you don't often leave you with information that makes you better at serving everyone else.
One more thing: if any store shows up on both lists - a Best Buyer who has also gone quiet - treat that as a priority. Don't wait for them to come back on their own. Reach out personally, soon, and via email (not Faire messages.)
None of this requires a sophisticated CRM or a large block of time. It requires your order data and a willingness to actually look at it. Also, if you want a step-by-step walkthrough of precisely how to do the analysis and what to do with each store, we give you that in Making Faire Work.
Your data already knows which stores matter most… you just have to ask it.
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