Online Marketplace Faire Launches Academy For Would-Be Retailers

Faire, the online marketplace founded as a way to connect independent retailers with wholesale vendors, has taken a new step in its campaign to create more small retailers. It is announcing today the launch of its Open with Faire Academy, an online lesson plan for anyone contemplating opening their first retail store.

Faire went from startup to a $12 billion valuation in under six years by tapping into the buying power of independent stores, and by making it easier to for the owners of those stores to buy from unique vendors and artisans from around the world.

It offers services to small shops that are designed to level the playing field between them and mass merchants, such as net 60 payment terms, free returns on opening orders, and access to startup capital. Now it is supplementing that support with a collection of online guides to topics ranging from registering a new business to negotiating retail real estate leases.

The online guides were written with input from successful Faire retailers “to help guide these new businesses, these new retailers, through the process of opening a business,” said Ami Vora, Chief Product Officer of Faire.

The guides are an extension of the company’s Open with Faire program, started in 2021, that extends inventory credit for Faire purchases to stock a new store in advance of opening.

With the online lessons, “the goal is really to help us be partners with these businesses, even well in advance of them needing the inventory financing that we originally opened the Open with Faire program for,” Vora said.

The guides focus on the most common questions Faire hears from new retailers - “the places where they get stuck,” Vora said. “For instance,” she said, “what are the different types of funding they should think about? What are the major questions their business plan should answer?”

“We want to be there to help give them a guide and a partner through all the difficult parts of opening a business,” she said.

Since creating the Open with Faire inventory financing program in 2021, Faire has extended over $100 million in inventory credit to over 15,000 new online and brick-and mortar small business owners across the United States and Europe.

Mackenzi Farquer is one of the store owners who used Open with Faire to finance her inventory when opening two stores during the pandemic, when it became difficult to get bank financing for store openings.

Farquer owns seven neighborhood shops in New York - in Astoria, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Jackson Heights, and Sunnyside - that sell a range of gift, home, stationery, and clothing items.

Farquer, who opened her first store in 2013, said she began buying from Faire in 2020, when the pandemic shut down all of the trade shows and vendor meetings where she used to discover merchadise for her shops.

“Trade shows and in-person rep meetings were absolutely off the table in New York City, and here comes Faire with this digital way to do things, offering net terms and free shipping,” Farquer said. “They really understood how to add value to lure people in.”

In 2021, as she was planning to open a new location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she found that banks were not underwriting new businesses or expansions because of the pandemic uncertainty.

“Along came Faire and they were like ‘Show us your lease, show us some tax documents and we will front you the money for everything you want to buy on Faire’. I found it exceptionally easy,” Farquer said. “I would say within a week it was done.”

“Obviously the caveat is that all that money has to be spent on Faire and also those orders are going to close quickly,” she said. “The merchandise needs to be paid for within 60 days, but it worked really well for us.” She used Open with Faire again when she opened her Sunnyside store last year.

Farquer believes one of the reasons she has been able to open seven thriving stores is “New York City folks love their neighborhoods. They get really community driven - people really love where they live,” and want to support local stores and things made by local vendors, she said. “A lot of what we sell are kids shirts, adults shirts, tote bags that have those neighborhoods on them, things made by local vendors - you can’t buy that on Amazon Amazon .”

Faire’s Vora said Faire believes that creating new stores with local store owners builds that sense of community in a neighborhood.

“One of the things we focus on is strengthening the character of local communities,” she said. “I think a key part of that is continuing to work with small businesses like local retailers who have physical spaces.”