I built Liquiproof into 3,000 retail doors the hard way. Trade shows, distributor meetings, cold calls to buyers who had no reason to take them, samples posted to people who never replied. It took years and it worked, and I would not want to do it that way again if I did not have to.
Faire is the reason a brand starting today does not have to. It is a wholesale marketplace where independent retailers browse, order and pay on terms, and where the demand side is completely free while brands carry the cost of the network. That trade is fair, and it is also more expensive than most founders realise when they sign up.
This is the channel modelled properly: what Faire charges, what a unit actually earns you, how that compares against DTC and direct wholesale, the one move that changes the economics permanently, and the four places the channel breaks.
Why retailers are on Faire (and why that matters to you)
Understand the retailer experience first, because it explains everything about the fee structure. A shop owner joins Faire for free, browses hundreds of thousands of products, orders with low or no minimums, gets Net 60 payment terms if they qualify, and can return a first order from a new brand at no risk. Faire has also run free shipping incentives for retailers trying a brand for the first time.
Look at that from behind the till. A shop can put your product on the shelf, sell it, and pay you out of the proceeds two months later, with the option to send it back if it does not move. There is almost no reason to say no. That is why the network grew to over 700,000 retailers, and roughly 75,000 of them now run POS integrations with Shopify, Square, Clover or Lightspeed. Faire reports that POS-integrated retailers place close to 20 percent more orders, which makes sense: when reordering is triggered by real sell-through data rather than a shop owner remembering, it happens more often.
Every one of those retailer benefits is funded by brands. Faire monetises the supply side entirely. You are not buying software. You are renting access to demand that somebody else paid to assemble.
The fee structure, in plain numbers
Faire has changed its fee model more than once, and a lot of the articles ranking for this question still quote an older structure. Here is how it works as published by Faire at the time of writing. Verify it in your own brand portal before you build a model on it.
15 percent commission on marketplace orders
Charged on the product subtotal, not including shipping, for any retailer Faire introduced to you. It applies to the first order and to every reorder afterwards, with no expiry and no taper.
A one-off new customer fee
Applied the first time a Faire-sourced retailer orders from you. It is a flat fee rather than a percentage under the current model, and it only ever charges once per retailer.
0 percent commission on Faire Direct
Retailers you invite onto the platform yourself through your own link order commission free. You still pay payment processing. This is where the channel maths actually gets interesting.
Payment processing of roughly 1.9 to 3.5 percent plus a fixed fee
The rate depends on how quickly you want to be paid. Faster payout, higher fee. Treat the difference as the cost of financing your own receivables, because that is exactly what it is.
The headline number is not the 15 percent. It is the word forever. An acquisition fee you pay once is a cost. A revenue share with no end date on a relationship you now service yourself is a partnership, whether you agreed to one or not.
The unit maths, worked end to end
Take a typical CPG unit. RRP of 20 GBP, keystone wholesale at 10 GBP, COGS of 5 GBP. That is a 50 percent gross margin at wholesale, which looks perfectly healthy on a spreadsheet and is where most founders stop calculating.
Now add the channel. Faire commission at 15 percent of the 10 GBP wholesale price is 1.50 GBP. Processing at around 2.9 percent is 0.29 GBP. Pick, pack, carton and your share of inbound freight, call it 0.80 GBP on this unit. You are left with 2.41 GBP, or roughly 24 percent contribution. Half your headline margin has gone, and you have not paid yourself yet.
Faire marketplace
24%
10 GBP wholesale, no CAC, 15 percent commission and processing deducted
Direct wholesale
~31%
Same unit sold to a stockist you found yourself, commission removed, outreach cost carried instead
DTC at full RRP
~13%
20 GBP order after COGS, shipping, fulfilment, processing and an 8 GBP acquisition cost
Read those three numbers carefully, because the conclusion is not the obvious one. Faire at 24 percent beats first-order DTC at 13 percent on this unit, and it beats it without you spending a penny on Meta. The channel is not expensive in isolation. It is expensive relative to the direct wholesale relationship it is standing in front of.
The other thing the maths hides is order size. A DTC order is one unit. A wholesale order is a carton. Your cost to service a 240 GBP wholesale order is a fraction of the cost of servicing twelve separate 20 GBP consumer orders, and the cash arrives in one payment. Wholesale contribution per hour of operational attention is far better than the percentage suggests, which is precisely why brands that only ever look at percentage margin undervalue the channel.
The one move that changes the economics: Faire Direct
Faire Direct is the part of the platform brands use least and should use most. It lets you invite retailers you sourced yourself onto Faire through your own link, and those orders carry no commission. You keep the ordering flow, the payment terms, the reorder prompts and the retailer-facing polish, and you pay nothing for the relationship because you brought it.
Work out what that is worth on a real account. A stockist ordering 400 GBP of product every six weeks is doing roughly 3,500 GBP a year with you. Sourced through the marketplace, Faire takes about 520 GBP of that annually, and keeps taking it for as long as the relationship lasts. Brought in through Faire Direct, it takes nothing beyond processing. Three years of that account is the difference between 1,560 GBP paid in commission and almost none.
So the operating rule is simple. Every retailer you meet at a trade show, get introduced to, find on Instagram, or already sell to gets your Faire Direct link, never a search on the marketplace. Use the marketplace for retailers you could not have found. Use Direct for everyone else. Most brands do the opposite by accident, because the marketplace is the path of least resistance and nobody tells them what it costs.
Where the channel breaks
Four failure modes, all of them common, none of them in the onboarding flow.
You priced wholesale off a DTC margin
The most expensive mistake and the most frequent. Brands set an RRP that works beautifully direct, halve it for wholesale, then discover the channel loses money once commission and handling land. Wholesale pricing has to be designed backwards from the wholesale unit economics, which usually means the RRP needs to be higher than a pure DTC brand would set it. Fix this before you list, because repricing a live stockist base is brutal.
Low minimums that lose money on handling
Discovery rewards brands with low or no minimums, so the platform nudges you towards accepting small orders. A 60 GBP order that takes the same pick, pack, carton and courier as a 300 GBP order is a rounding error on revenue and a real cost on the P&L. Set your minimum off your fully loaded cost to ship one carton, not off what the algorithm prefers.
You never own the relationship
Marketplace orders come with a commission that never stops, and the retailer relationship sits inside somebody else's platform. You can and should build a direct line to every stockist worth keeping: an account owner, a reorder cadence, a named contact, a reason to call. If your top twenty stockists only exist as rows in a marketplace dashboard, you have distribution but you do not have a wholesale business.
Cash timing nobody planned for
Net 60 for the retailer is a real cost of goods sold sitting in your working capital for two months, and faster Faire payouts cost you a higher processing rate to compensate. If you are also funding inventory ahead of orders, a wholesale channel scaling quickly can be the thing that breaks your cash flow while your revenue chart looks excellent. Model the cash conversion cycle before you push volume through it.
How to launch on Faire properly
Build the wholesale unit model first. RRP, wholesale price, COGS, commission, processing, pick and pack, carton, freight. If contribution after all of it does not clear your target, change the price or do not list.
Set a minimum order value that covers a carton economically. Expect it to sit higher than the platform suggests and accept slightly slower discovery in exchange for orders that pay.
Pick a range, not a catalogue. Retailers buying blind want three to six clear hero SKUs with obvious shelf logic, not your full assortment. Depth of sell-through on a few lines beats breadth every time.
Treat the listing like a product page. Lifestyle and pack shots, sell-through proof, the reason a customer picks it up, and merchandising guidance. Buyers are deciding whether it will move, not whether they personally like it.
Route every retailer you sourced yourself through Faire Direct. Make the link part of your standard trade outreach so it happens by default rather than by memory.
Track reorder rate by stockist from month one. New stockist count is a vanity metric in wholesale. Reorder rate is the only number that tells you the product is selling off the shelf rather than sitting on it.
Build a named account plan for the top 20 percent. Personal contact, reorder prompts before they run out, and support that makes you the easiest brand in their stockroom to keep buying.
What this looks like in practice
A brand I work with had been on Faire for eight months with 60 stockists and was treating it as a success. Revenue was growing, new accounts were landing, the dashboard looked great. Two numbers said otherwise. Reorder rate was under 30 percent, meaning most of those stockists had bought once and never again, and the average order value was low enough that handling was eating the contribution on roughly a third of orders.
We did three things. Raised the minimum order value so a carton paid for itself, cut the listed range from fourteen SKUs to five with the clearest shelf story, and built a proper reorder motion for the stockists that had actually sold through, starting with a call rather than an automated nudge. Every retailer they sourced themselves from that point on went through Faire Direct.
New stockist count slowed. Contribution from the channel roughly doubled, because the accounts they had were finally reordering and the orders were sized to be worth shipping. That is the trade nobody wants to make and almost everyone should.
Inside the system
How we build this for brands
Wholesale is a research and follow-up problem before it is a sales problem, which makes it a good fit for the agent systems we run. We use buyer discovery agents to find the independents and regional chains that actually stock a brand's category in a given area, then relationship agents trained on the brand's voice and its real customer language to open the first conversation properly rather than with a templated trade email. Reply monitoring sits on top, so every response gets an answer written for that specific buyer instead of a sequence step.
Behind that, a reporting agent tracks the numbers that decide whether the channel is working: contribution per carton, reorder rate by stockist, and the accounts drifting towards lapse before they lapse. And because independents buy brands their own customers are already asking for, we pair it with the owned-audience work, small IRL tastings and events with the right customers in a stockist's catchment, so the pull exists before the buyer is asked for shelf space. Part of this runs live for portfolio brands today; the full system is what we deploy when we take a brand on.
Wholesale Growth Audit
Find Out What Your Wholesale Channel Is Actually Worth
I will model your wholesale unit economics properly, work out what each stockist is worth over three years, and show you where commission, handling and cash timing are quietly taking your margin. I built 3,000 retail doors before marketplaces existed. I know where this channel pays and where it does not.
Book Your Wholesale AuditFrequently asked questions
How much commission does Faire charge brands?
Faire charges 15 percent commission on the product subtotal for orders from retailers it sourced for you, excluding shipping, plus a one-off new customer fee the first time a Faire-sourced retailer orders. Payment processing runs roughly 1.9 to 3.5 percent plus a fixed fee depending on payout speed. Orders from retailers you bring in yourself through Faire Direct carry 0 percent commission. Faire has revised this structure more than once, so check current terms in your brand portal. Older articles still quote a 25 percent first-order figure from a previous model.
Is selling on Faire profitable for a CPG brand?
It can be, but only if you price for it before you list. On a 20 GBP RRP unit with a 10 GBP wholesale price and 5 GBP COGS, commission and processing take around 1.79 GBP, leaving roughly 2.41 GBP of contribution after pick, pack and carton. That is about 24 percent. The channel wins because no customer acquisition cost is attached to it, not because the margin is generous.
What is Faire Direct and why does it matter?
Faire Direct lets you invite retailers you already have or sourced yourself onto the platform through your own link, commission free. You keep the ordering flow, payment terms and reorder mechanics without paying a revenue share on a relationship you brought. It is the single biggest lever in the channel. Every retailer routed through Direct rather than the marketplace saves 15 percent on every reorder that follows.
Does Faire commission stop after the first order?
No. Commission on marketplace-sourced retailers continues on reorders with no end date. A stockist reordering monthly for three years pays Faire a share of every order, which turns a one-off acquisition fee into a permanent revenue share. It is the strongest argument for routing sourced retailers through Faire Direct and building direct relationships with your best accounts.
Should a DTC brand launch on Faire or pitch retailers directly?
Use Faire for discovery and direct for depth. Faire is efficient at finding independents you would never reach cold, because the retailers are already there and Net 60 terms remove their risk. Direct pitching is better for the accounts that matter most: regional chains, category-defining independents, and anyone whose reorder volume justifies a relationship. Most brands should run both.
What minimum order value should I set on Faire?
High enough that pick, pack, carton and outbound freight do not eat the order. Faire rewards low minimums in discovery, which pulls brands into accepting orders that lose money once handling is counted. Work out your fully loaded cost to ship one carton, then set the minimum where contribution after that cost clears your target. For most CPG brands that lands between 150 and 300 GBP.
About the author
Caner Veli is a DTC operator who has helped 350+ brands fix broken growth engines. He built Liquiproof from zero to 3,000+ global retailers in under 6 years. He now runs the same playbook, supported by AI systems he built himself, for DTC and CPG brands.