On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2019. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Max ↗
In their words
We are a wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers with products that we guarantee will sell in their stores. When I say guarantee, we actually underwrite the inventory risk for these stores.
For most of human history retail was local. Almost everything that was bought and sold up until about a hundred years ago was bought from our neighbours.
Over the course of the past ten years there has been a renaissance of local retail. Big box stores prepared these independent stores for a future dominated by Amazon.
Around the web ×1
Quick answers
What is Faire?
A wholesale marketplace between independent retailers and the brands that make what they sell. Faire underwrites the inventory risk, letting a shop return anything it buys within 60 days — the mechanic Rhodes says had never been possible before.
What is the 'future is local' argument?
That independent shops already survived the big-box era by competing on curation rather than price and assortment, which is exactly the thing an online marketplace cannot copy — so they are better positioned against Amazon than the standard story assumes.
Where did the idea come from?
Rhodes opened his TechTO talk with the shoe shop he bought his soccer cleats from growing up in small-town Oklahoma, and what happened to its owner when a chain store opened on the edge of town.