Faire Report #18: It's holidays time.

What’s on my brain this week?

Faire Summer Market is over. Hopefully you’ve taken a breath, processed the orders and caught up on everything that was pushed aside during the event.

Now it is time to hit Q4.

Summer Market is only one part of the wider holiday buying season. The Q4 wholesale window has already been open for a while, and retailers are actively looking for the products they want on their shelves for Christmas.

It’s all about Q4 now

The final quarter is by far the biggest sales period of the year for many product brands, but wholesale begins much earlier than B2C.

Retailers need time to discover products, place orders, receive stock, merchandise their stores and start selling before consumer demand peaks. That means the work required to win Christmas cannot begin in November.

If you are reading this and you have not yet optimised your Faire account for the holidays, you need to act now. There is still an opportunity, but the window will not stay open forever.

Get your listings ready for seasonal searches

Our first recommendation is to read our book, How to Get More Sales on Faire. It will help you make sure the foundations of your account are working before you start layering on seasonal activity.

From there, review your listings and add the seasonal keywords retailers are already using. Think about Christmas gifts, stocking fillers, holiday décor, Secret Santa, corporate gifting and any other searches that are genuinely relevant to your products.

One important thing to know is that adding certain seasonal keywords can cause Faire to mark a product as final sale and non-returnable. If the product is genuinely designed for the holiday season, we would usually still recommend using the relevant keywords.

If your brand regularly receives a high number of returns, that is a separate issue worth investigating. Do not weaken the discoverability of a genuinely seasonal product to avoid addressing a wider problem with the range.

Merchandise your store for gifting

There is a reason Q4 is known as the golden quarter. Retailers are not simply shopping for products; they are shopping for gifts.

Make it incredibly easy for them to understand where your products fit. Show which items work as stocking fillers, teacher gifts, host gifts, corporate presents or ready-made gift sets. Think about bundles, packaging, displays and point-of-sale options that make the products easier to merchandise in-store.

We would also create a custom seasonal banner for your Faire shop page. It is a simple update, but it immediately shows retailers that your store is active, relevant and ready for the season they are currently buying for.

When a retailer lands on your page, they should instantly feel that they are in the right place. Your products, imagery, keywords and shop design should all reinforce the same message: this brand is ready for Q4.

Final thought

Summer Market may be over, but the real holiday opportunity is still in front of you. Take the breather, then get back into the account and make sure every part of it is ready to convert Q4 demand.

See you on the marketplace,

Andy