Faire Wholesale Marketplace Seeing A Big Opportunity In Books

The online wholesale marketplace Faire has noticed an interesting development over the past year.

The marketplace, which was launched to give startup brands a way to sell unique items to local stores and shops, is now being used by some of the country’s leading publishers to sell lots of books.

Publishers and booksellers have done over $100 million in sales through the platform, and book sales currently are surging, with sales up 75% year-over-year, according to Faire.

Publishers including Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, and Chronicle Books, are using the Faire marketplace to expand into new, non-traditional, retail opportunities.

Retailers Respond To Book Offerings

According to Faire, nearly 50,000 retailers have purchased books from the Faire platform.

The trend highlights the changing world of retail distribution, as brands and vendors seek new ways to reach to increasingly important independent store market.

“The demand is there,” said Faire President Lauren Cooks Levitan. With “hundreds of thousands of independent retailers that shop on Faire, who are in a whole range of categories, from the yoga studio to the gift shop to the plant store – books are a category that can slide into virtually every one of this retailers, and yet it hasn’t historically been a place that the big publishers have targeted with their other distribution models,” she said in n interview.

The trend has given Faire retailers a richer assortment of products for their shop and “it’s clearly established a whole new range of distribution and growth opportunities for the publishers,” Levitan said.

Physical Books A $70 Billion Market

Sales of physical books are seeing a bit of a resurgence, almost as an antidote to an increasingly digital world, according to a report by research firm Statista. The report puts the size of the worldwide market for physical books at $70 billion.

Simon & Schuster began selling through Faire in 2024 and since then has connected with 5,000 retail storefronts through the platform.

The publisher has seen impressive incremental sales from Faire and expects to see continued growth, Nicole Vines Verlin, Vice President of Special Markets for Simon & Schuster, said in an interview.

Simon & Schuster began selling through Faire because “we wanted to look for new markets and it was the right time and we felt it was the right partner,” Verlin said.

“Within the first six months, we started to see some really nice sales lifts,” she said.

Faire is helping Simon & Schuster expand its reach to more stores, Verlin said.

“This helps us maximize our coverage,” she said. “There are stores that are in remote areas, there are stores whose owners don’t have a lot of time to make appointments with different reps to come in and look at different lines. The business we’re seeing on Faire, it’s really incremental, and its new business that we weren’t getting before. I think that’s a win-win for everybody.”