Reimagining B2B Commerce with Faire

If commerce is a transaction between buyer and seller, the face of the seller is evolving with new tools for discovery and purchase that allow for a personal relationship between creator and customer. Beyond a corporation or mass retailer, the seller is now frequently a person or small business. We are seeing a new long-tail retailer learning how t... See more

The window of opportunity has largely closed, however, this is far from being the case for B2B marketplaces. Whilst consumers are able to order just about anything online, most businesses have not even started transacting online... That being said, I suspect that this category is where the next generation of outliers will be built.

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more

Looking at the ~$3T value creation in e-commerce over the last two decades, one might feel that the best of e-commerce is behind us. However, in Amazon lingo, I believe we are still on Day 1. Current penetration is still low (~17% in US). New categories are coming online such as grocery and pharmacy.

Now-established players have learned that Instagram advertisements and influencer campaigns only scale to a point: they can net no more than a few hundred thousand of a brand’s “first best” customers. This has driven a shift toward physical retail and prompted founders to agonize over if and when to peddle their wares on Amazon, making direct to co... See more

Covid-19 has created short-term winners and losers. But the more structural impact is that trends already under way have been accelerated. Everything was already moving online. Now this is happening even faster. Online marketplaces now have a combined value of $814 billion globally. 58% of consumer marketplaces could be well-positioned to navigate ... See more