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.

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.

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. 

Like so many people, I got really into The Great British Baking Show a few years back.

After a stressful day, there is something bizarrely relaxing about watching people frantically bake Cardamom-Vanilla Cupcakes With Raspberry Coulis Filling.

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.

In this article, we’re talking about the power and opportunity of email newsletters: using email to engage with your community and build relationships.

Editor’s note: Originally, Candid started at well under $100/month with unlimited users. But as of March, 2024, Candid’s price increased to a minimum of $179/month. For many small makers and brands this may be well out of range as a fee that makes sense. This article was originally written when the tool was more affordable, but at that higher price, think carefully about whether it makes sense for you before proceeding.

So much of running a creative business boils down to words on a page. What you write in your outreach to stores, social media captions, wholesale marketplace listings, “about” page, and other materials are where the rubber meets the road. These are the places where your vision and dream and work touch the people who can support that work.

Whatever you are facing right now, you likely feel a large amount of stress and a lack of clarity. You feel pressure to reinvent what you are doing in your business but don’t have the support to make that happen. I believe that for most business owners, COVID-19 has created an unfamiliar and disorienting economy and landscape. It’s not a time when you can simply do what you’ve always done. But I also believe -- based on what I am seeing from the business owners we serve -- that this landscape is one you can succeed in with the right tools.