‘The fastest growing business we’ve ever launched’: Faire adds retargeting capabilities to its ad business
Wholesale marketplace Faire is growing its advertising business as the program expands to more brands.
Last September, Faire rolled out its Promoted Listings as the marketplace’s first wholesale advertising tool. Now, more than 7,000 brands are currently advertising on Faire, Founded in 2017, Faire acts as a digital marketplace that connects brands with independent retailers who are looking to carry more products in their stores. Currently, more than 100,000 brands sell on Faire globally, covering categories ranging from food and beverage to homeware and pets. On average, Faire says brands that advertised on its platform saw an 80% increase in views of their products in search results and category pages since the program’s official launch in September.
This week, Faire is rolling out a new functionality within Promoted Listings that allows brands to promote their products to returning customers (in this case, retailers) to help drive reorders. According to Faire, the feature will be rolling out to brands over the next few months. Previously, brands were only able to advertise to new retailers on Faire, and this update will allow them widen their reach to generate more orders.
Max Rhodes, co-founder and CEO of Faire, said the Promoted Listings tool now accounts for nearly 5% of Faire’s revenue. “That makes it the fastest growing business we’ve ever launched,” Rhodes said.
So far the reception from small CPG brands has been positive. Through Promoted Listings, Rhodes said brands can set a budget and track the ROI of how many new retailers are ordering from these listings. Brands don’t pay to join the platform and only pay for Promoted Listings when a retailer clicks on their promoted listings.
To build on the current tool, Rhodes said Faire is focusing on more personalizations. For example, the new targeting functionality comes at the request of brands using Faire’s ads. In a survey, Faire found 80% of brands are interested in running ads to acquire new customers while also growing existing relationships to drive more reorders.
The way it works currently, Rhodes said, is that a brand’s ad slots are dependent on its products’ relevance to each retailer and the likelihood to convert them. Generally speaking, Rhodes said that the most buzzy CPG brands that are in-demand among buyers are also the ones getting the most return out of Promoted Listings. That gives the company’s ad business a lot of room to grow, as it seeks to convince more brands that Faire’s ad tools provide a worthy ROI.
Allocating ad dollars to target specialty retailers
Cookie brand Fancypants began testing Faire’s Promoted Listings in November to target natural and specialty shops, after launching on the platform in March. So far, the ads are generating new orders. In January, the brand secured 27 new retailers over the course of four days.
Fancypants founder and CEO Maura Duggan said the biggest draw has been the diverse types of retailers finding the brand through Faire ads. “We got a lot of new retail customers that normally would never have found us otherwise,” Duggan said.
For example, wine and beer shops are ordering Fancypants cookies to merchandise as checkout add-ons. “I think our packaging really stands out on shelves, so gift shops are also gravitating toward the aesthetics,” Duggan explained.
Saladsprinkles, a brand that makes puffed rice-based salad toppings, launched last July. The brand also debuted on Faire as part of its launch strategy and began using the ads in September.
Saladsprinkles co-founder Jordan Wannemacher said part of the brand’s launch strategy was to get on Faire right away to target independent retailers across the country. So when the Promoted Listings program rolled out, Wannemacher said the brand wanted to get in early to test it. “We wanted to see if our ad money would be better spent on Faire than Meta or TikTok ads,” she continued.
Like Fancypants, Saladsprinkles found that some retailers that it normally wouldn’t have thought to target, like gift shops, began ordering Saladsprinkles’ products. “Because the product is a novelty among grocery products, we’ve gotten a lot of good traction in the gifting space,” Wannemacher said.
To date, most of Saladsprinkles’ independent retail partners discovered the brand through Faire. “A lot of that has been through the ads and our own outreach in targeting places that we know are on Faire,” Wannemacher said. Saladsprinkles is currently averaging one new retailer on Faire a week. “We’ve already had several reorders through our discount incentives for returning customers [which aim] to keep that velocity moving,” Wannemacher said.
With the program still growing from the simple promoted listings, Wannemacher said deeper customization of brands’ Faire display ads would be ideal down the line. For its part, Saladsprinkles plans to make Promoted Listings a permanent part of its ad strategy.
However, not every brand says they have found success with Faire’s ad tools. One food founder who spoke to Modern Retail on condition of anonymity said testing the Faire ads briefly didn’t bring in any new sales. “It didn’t do anything for us,” the founder said. While she admitted that more time may be needed to see conversion, the founder said she is choosing to wait for it to grow first. “I found the backend hard to use, and it is still pricey for a bootstrapped brand like ours,” she said.
Fancypants’ Duggan said improvements, like allowing brands to target specific types of retailers, would help optimize the listings. “I did have to invest some money in the Promoted Listings,” Duggan said. “But based on what we spent, I felt there was a great return in helping us stand out on the platform.”
Wannemacher said the relatively low cost of Faire’s ads is ideal for small brands with limited budgets. “The way Promoted Listings is set up is you only pay for conversions. That makes it a low lift for a new brand like ours,” Wannemacher said.