Online wholesale marketplace Faire seems to be hitting its stride, more than tripling its business in just one year.
Now, with $260 million of fresh funding in its coffers, the San Francisco-based company is primed to do a lot more growing. The Series F was led by Sequoia Capital and values Faire at a whopping $7 billion, nearly triple its valuation just six months ago.
“We are in the midst of a multi-decade digital transformation,” Ravi Gupta, a partner at Sequoia, said in a statement. “The world-class team at Faire is leading the way in digitizing the multi-trillion-dollar global wholesale market.”
Founded in 2017 by a team of Square alumni, Faire aims to help connect local, independent retailers with other small and medium-sized brands so they can stock their shelves without having to rely on big box stores like Amazon and Walmart. Retailers can browse through thousands of products, filtering to find things that are handmade, eco-friendly, and even specifically not sold on Amazon. The platform also provides the brands with sales, marketing and analytics tools to help them grow their business.
Of course, Faire proved to be an especially useful resource for its tens of thousands of customers amid the pandemic. The company says lockdowns forced the majority of its users to temporarily close their brick-and-mortar locations, causing inventory orders on the site to plunge by more than 60 percent. For many of these small retailers, this was the first time they really had to rely on their website and social media presence to survive. To help them manage, Faire rolled out several new products, including integrations with Square and Shopify, and the company continued to improve its machine learning algorithms to help its customers make better purchasing decisions.
In the end, Faire says the majority of its retailers reported an increase in sales over the course of this past year, and more than 50 percent of the brands it surveyed said most of their revenue this year came from wholesale business.
“Faire’s pace of growth signals that independent retailers across the globe are evolving and changing the face of the retail industry as we have known it,” Faire CEO and co-founder Max Rhodes said in a statement. “We have always believed in this thriving community of entrepreneurs, and are honored to be a navigating partner for them through the pandemic and into these periods of recovery.”
Now, Faire is working to provide that same level of support to brands and retailers globally. This funding announcement comes just a couple months after the company expanded into Europe, opening operations in the U.K., Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. And the site already appears to be taking off — Faire says that, in just 30 days, its growth in Europe outpaced its U.S. growth by 230 percent, with volume annualizing to about $50 million (a scale that took nearly two years to reach in the U.S., according to the company).
To keep up the momentum in both Europe and the U.S., Faire says it plans to use this fresh funding to continue building out its platform, with an emphasis on the growing category of apparel. It also plans to “significantly increase” its headcount. The company has about 500 employees globally, and expects to double in the next year, with about 50 open tech positions available at its San Francisco headquarters.
“Faire will continue to invest in independent brands and retailers at one of the most important times in history, as small businesses reopen around the world,” Rhodes added. “We know that they will rebuild and reimagine the future of retail to better serve their local communities.”
