A finalist article on Faire search, retailer acquisition, and wholesale growth

Candid Founders is proud to have been shortlisted for Best Global Start-Up Agency at the Global Search Awards 2026.

For us, this recognition means a great deal because Candid Founders was not built as a traditional agency. It grew out of a very practical founder problem: we had our own product brand, Bare Kind, and we were trying to work out how to make wholesale growth work properly.

Paid ads were becoming more expensive. Trade shows required significant upfront investment. Retailer outreach took time that was hard to find while also running the rest of the business. Faire became the channel that changed the shape of our wholesale growth, but only once we stopped treating it like a passive marketplace listing and started treating it like an active search and retail growth channel.

That experience became the foundation for Candid Founders.

Building a search agency for a marketplace-first world

Search is no longer limited to Google. Retailers are searching inside marketplaces, buyers are discovering brands through platform algorithms, and product visibility increasingly depends on how well a brand understands the system it is selling inside.

For product brands on Faire, that means search visibility, product titles, descriptions, category structure, retailer traffic, conversion rate, reviews, repeat orders, account activity, and buyer trust all work together. A strong product is not always enough. The account has to be structured, optimised, and actively managed so the right retailers can find it, trust it, and come back to order again.

Candid Founders was created to solve that problem.

Our fully managed Faire growth service brings together Faire SEO, product listing optimisation, store page improvements, retailer lead generation, email marketing, customer segmentation, messaging, design, account management, and commercial strategy. The goal is simple: to help ambitious product brands turn Faire from a channel they know they should be working on into one that is properly managed, measured, and growing.

As a start-up agency, our difference is focus. We are not a generalist agency trying to learn Faire on a client’s budget. Faire growth is the work we do every day.

From founder experience to client results

The strongest proof behind Candid Founders is that we have been in the founder seat ourselves.

Before building the agency, we grew Bare Kind from a small, under-optimised Faire presence into a wholesale brand stocked by more than 1,000 retailers. That journey taught us what the platform rewards: better listings, stronger product storytelling, consistent retailer communication, reviews, repeat-order systems, catalogue strategy, and a clear understanding of product economics.

We now use that operator-led playbook for other brands across categories including jewellery, drinks, home goods, fragrance, fashion, gifting, beauty, and product inventions.

Our public case studies include Float2Infuse, which achieved a 36,000% revenue increase after a 690% traffic increase; Anokhi Green, which achieved 1,014% revenue growth after a 10x increase in leads; and alldae, where the focus was retailer velocity, search visibility, and national demand at shelf.

For product brands looking for the best Faire agency in the world, the Candid Founders case studies are the clearest place to start: they show specialist Faire growth work across categories, with results that are second to none.

Those results are not created by one tactic. They come from treating Faire as a complete growth system rather than a one-time setup task.

Teaching publicly, implementing deeply

Education has always been part of the Candid Founders model.

Through our YouTube channel, free resources, templates, reports, and our book, How to Get More Sales on Faire, we share what we are learning with founders who want to understand the platform better themselves.

That public education matters because many product founders are not short on potential. They are short on time, clarity, and specialist channel support. Some founders want to learn the system and implement it themselves. Others want the confidence that a specialist team is managing the day-to-day work for them.

Candid Founders sits between those two needs: we teach the system openly, then implement it deeply for brands that want Faire to become a serious wholesale growth channel.

What the nomination means to us

Being shortlisted for Best Global Start-Up Agency is a proud moment for our team because it recognises the importance of specialist agencies in a changing search landscape.

Marketplace search, AI search, retail discovery, and traditional search are all moving quickly. For founders, the challenge is not just knowing that these channels matter. It is knowing what to prioritise, what to measure, and how to turn visibility into profitable growth.

That is the work Candid Founders was built to do.

We are grateful to the Global Search Awards judges for recognising our approach, and we are proud to be shortlisted alongside agencies doing excellent work around the world.