Image credit: Faire
San Francisco-based Faire is a company that helps retailers find and buy wholesale merchandise for their stores. In a recent development, the online wholesale marketplace, announced that it has raised $260M in its Series F round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.
With this funding, Faire is now valued at $7B, nearly tripling its previous valuation of $2.5B, announced just over six months ago.
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Investors
According to the company, it has raised a total of $698.9M in funding, to date. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Y Combinator, DST Global, Dragoneer, D1 Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and new global investors Baillie Gifford and Wellington Management.
Use of the funds
The proceeds from this round will help the company to build tools and market events that equip its customers with the resources they need to thrive, including doubling down on its investment within apparel after witnessing category growth.
Besides, this capital will also help Faire to increase its headcount across all global offices, as well as introduce its platform into new markets to create a globalised marketplace where retailers and brands around the world can seamlessly connect and compete against retail giants.
“We believe the future of retail is local”
Faire was founded in 2017 by Square alumni Max Rhodes, Marcelo Cortes, Jeff Kolovson, and Daniele Perito. Faire is a wholesale marketplace that takes a data-driven approach to connect local, independent retailers with brands and artisans to stock their shelves with the best goods.
Faire is a two-sided marketplace and wholesale platform that helps retailers find and buy unique wholesale merchandise for their stores while helping brands and makers reach local retailers.
The company offers business owners a toolkit of simple tech, data insights, financial terms, and logistics solutions to support the future of local retail. Faire’s net 60 payment terms and free returns take the risk out of the wholesale business so that local retailers and independent brands can compete with big-box and e-commcerce giants.
The company has over 200,000 retailers on board across North America and Europe and 20,000 brands from over 80 countries. It has also reported a 300 per cent year-on-year volume growth.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco and Kitchener-Waterloo and also has offices in Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Toronto, London, and São Paulo. With 500 employees, Faire expects to double its headcount in the next year, including hiring dozens of employees in Europe and opening a London office.
Faire’s European growth
Earlier this year in March, Faire announced its expansion into Europe, bringing its global network of curated brands and business tools to independent retailers across the United Kingdom. The company has now expanded its operation across the largest markets in Europe, including the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, and has plans to expand across all of continental Europe in the coming months.
According to Faire, independent retailers across North America and Europe are doing more than twice the revenue of Walmart and Amazon combined. Within the first 30 days of launching the platform in each respective market, Faire’s Europe growth outpaced US growth by 230 per cent.
The company claims that its volume in Europe is now annualising to roughly $50M, a scale that took nearly two years to reach in the US. Additionally, the platform’s launch in Europe has generated fast-paced growth of international brand supply, ramping to nearly 5 per cent of overall Faire volume shortly after launch.
The expansion not only boosted the European brand growth abroad, it also helped North American retailers’ access to goods around the world. To date, 15,000 US-based retailers have purchased from international brands on Faire.
The platform is continuously improving its machine-learning algorithm to empower retailers to make better purchase decisions, iterate on trends at a faster pace, provide seamless access to unique goods from around the world, and give them competitive advantage against mainstream items found in chain stores. As a result, the majority of surveyed Faire retailers reported increased sales one year out from the start of the pandemic, while over 50 per cent of surveyed Faire brands reported that the majority of their revenue within the past year has come from wholesale business. Their ability to leverage the efficiency of the online experience enabled Faire to triple its business, selling over 75 million products within the last year.
Looking ahead, the National Retail Federation has projected the fastest rise in retail sales in over two decades. This, combined with an Intuit survey revealing that 82 per cent of consumers would spend more to support local businesses after the pandemic, depicts an increasingly positive outlook on independent retailers winning back more of the market.
Faire CEO, Max Rhodes, believes, “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. We have always believed in this thriving community of entrepreneurs and are honoured to be a navigating partner for them through the pandemic and into these periods of recovery. 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. We know that they will rebuild and reimagine the future of retail to better serve their local communities.”
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