The Shelf — Issue 05

Hi there,

Most brands on Faire are treating it like a passive catalogue. Upload your products, set your minimum, wait for orders.

That worked in 2020. It stopped working in 2022 when Faire opened the platform to a dramatically larger number of brands. The ones still thinking that way are watching their visibility quietly decline and not understanding why.

This issue is about what the Faire algorithm actually rewards now, where specific categories are getting crowded, and where the real whitespace is heading into the second half of 2026.

Faire considers over 100 factors to determine how your products are ranked and surfaced to buyers. The goal of the system, in Faire's own words, is to help retailers find relevant products and reduce their risk of a bad order. That framing is the key to everything.

Faire's algorithm is not optimising for you. It is optimising for the retailer's experience. It surfaces brands that are easy to find, easy to evaluate, and reliable to order from. Every factor in the algorithm traces back to one of those three things.

Which means the question to ask yourself is not "how do I rank higher?" It is "how do I reduce the perceived risk for a buyer who has never heard of me?"

01. Your listings

This is the highest-leverage thing you control. Keyword-rich titles in the 35 to 50 character range, a minimum of four product photos per listing with a white background lead image, and descriptions written for a retailer, not a consumer. A retailer needs to understand why their customers will buy this, not just what it looks like.

In March 2025, Faire rolled out AI-powered listing recommendations that suggest small changes to titles and descriptions to improve search performance. If you have not reviewed these recommendations in your seller portal, that is worth doing this week.

Catalog freshness also matters more than most brands realise. Brands that add new products at least quarterly rank roughly 20% higher than brands with stagnant catalogs. Seasonal bundles, new colorways, and limited editions all count. You do not need entirely new designs. You need new listings.

02. Your performance metrics

Faire is actively scoring your behaviour on the platform and using those scores to determine your visibility. The metrics that matter most: lead time accuracy, cancellation rate, response time to messages, review count and rating, and whether orders arrive complete and undamaged.

Two numbers worth knowing. Brands with 35 or more five-star reviews see roughly a 10% conversion improvement. And once any customer service metric, whether cancellations, missing items, or late shipments, gets above 25%, it becomes very difficult to recover sales momentum on the platform.

The practical implication: your first few orders on Faire are disproportionately important. They set your baseline metrics. Treat them accordingly.

03. Buyer behaviour and platform signals

This is the part you cannot directly control. Faire personalises search results to each retailer based on their past behaviour on the platform: what they have bought, what categories they browse, what they save. Your products will show up differently for different buyers.

What you can do is ensure your listings are accurate, well-tagged, and categorised correctly so the algorithm has the right information to match you with the right buyers. Zero MOQ is one specific signal worth knowing about. Faire's own documentation confirms that offering zero minimum order quantity boosts visibility in search. If your business model allows for it, the visibility benefit is real.

The clearest pattern among brands growing fastest on Faire in 2026 is not a tactic. It is a mindset shift. They are treating Faire like an active search engine, not a passive directory.

In practice that means three things most sellers are not doing.

They are using Faire Direct aggressively. When a retailer orders through your Faire Direct link, you pay 0% commission instead of 15%. That gap compounds significantly over time across a full retailer relationship. Brands with existing wholesale accounts are leaving real money on the table by not directing those accounts through their Direct link.

They are building relationships off the platform. Faire permits you to contact retailers directly via email, you simply cannot move the transaction off the platform. The brands with the strongest reorder rates maintain their own retailer CRM and reach out quarterly. The platform is a facilitation layer, not the whole relationship.

They are not running ads before their fundamentals are solid. Faire promoted listings amplify what already exists strong or weak. The sequence matters: listings first, metrics second, ads third.

Not every category on Faire is experiencing the same conditions right now.

Candles and jewelry are the two most oversaturated categories on the platform. Thousands of suppliers competing for the same buyer attention, and the signal-to-noise ratio has made it increasingly hard to stand out on search alone. This doesn't mean exit these categories. It means differentiation has to work harder, and if you are deciding where to invest in new product development, these are the categories where the return is hardest to predict.

Where the whitespace actually is:

Design-led pet lifestyle is the fastest-moving category shift across global Faire data right now. At Faire's July 2025 market, design-forward pet products were standout performers: bandanas, ceramic bowls, woven mats, beds built to match home décor rather than look like generic pet supplies. If you already have artwork that works across home or lifestyle categories, extending into coordinating pet products is a low-friction move.

Premium stationery and art supplies are growing at 8.2% annually, nearly double the broader stationery market's 4.75% growth rate. The driver is Millennials and Gen Z buying premium, aesthetically considered stationery as part of how they think about their workspace and creative practice. The $38 hand-finished journal is growing faster than the $8 greeting card.

Health, wellness, and sustainable goods are the categories where US boutique buyers are most actively looking for more and finding less that meets the bar. The gap is not in the products themselves. It is in the design quality. Wellness products that are also beautifully designed represent the clearest whitespace in US boutique retail right now.

One format worth keeping in mind as you plan your next range: the coordinated pet and home set.

Take your strongest existing artwork. Apply it across a tea towel, a matching pet bandana, and a ceramic pet bowl. Package together as a gift set at around $50 retail. One artwork. Three products. A customer base wider than your existing range, and a pet buyer who now knows your brand.

We're trying something new this issue, a round-up of the most relevant news from across the gift, home, and wholesale industry. Tell us if this is useful.

NY NOW under new ownership - Effective April 13, NY NOW was acquired by Rockview Management Group, led by industry veterans Dorothy Belshaw, William Lacey, and Karen Olson. Belshaw previously served as director of the New York International Gift Fair more than 14 years ago. The new ownership has described this as a full reimagining of the show, built with intention and focused on delivering real value for brands and buyers. Summer Market proceeds as planned, August 2–4 at the Javits Center. If you exhibit at or attend NY NOW, expect a different experience this year.

Andmore CEO retiring May 31 - Jon Pertchik, CEO of Andmore, which owns and operates Atlanta Market and Las Vegas Market, is retiring at the end of this month. An executive committee comprising the company's current leadership is taking over. No disruption to upcoming shows is expected, but it is worth watching how the new structure shapes the direction of the two biggest US gift wholesale trade show venues.

OneCoast expands with exclusive Giftcraft partnership OneCoast, one of the largest US gift sales rep groups, has added Giftcraft to its portfolio as an exclusive brand partnership. A signal of how rep groups are consolidating around fewer, deeper brand relationships, and what that means for brands trying to get rep group attention.

Mud Pie and Demdaco both bringing in new senior leadership Mud Pie named a new Chief Marketing Officer this week. Demdaco, now under sole ownership, has brought back an industry veteran as VP of Product and Brand. Two of the most-watched brands in the US gift and lifestyle space are actively rebuilding their product and marketing direction. Worth keeping an eye on where they take their ranges in the second half of 2026.

That’s it for this week. Short, useful, no pitch.
If any of this sparked an idea, a product you’d like to explore, a trend you want to lean into, a cost comparison you’d like us to run just reply to this email. That’s what we’re here for.

Until next week,
The Printwagon Team

Wagon Brands Corporation ·  printwagon.com