Content Index

Faire

Year2017StageSeedAI LensAI as Intelligence LayerLead PartnerKirsten Green

What they do

Wholesale has been relationship-locked and operationally manual. Faire digitizes discovery, financing, and reordering so independent retailers and emerging brands can scale together.

Why we invested

Forerunner was drawn to Faire by the clarity of the problem and the ingenuity of the solution. Independent retailers trusted trade shows because they could touch and feel products before committing. Taking that confidence online required a different structure: free returns and a buy-now-pay-later model that shifted the inventory risk from the retailer to Faire. The underlying bet was that pooling risk across a large body of vendors would make the credit model sustainable over time. Today, Faire hosts more than 60,000 brands and serves over 400,000 small retailers across North America and Europe — with a business model that succeeds only when its customers do.

Read the announcement