Candid Wholesale

Candid Wholesale is a software startup based in Portland, Oregon. Its platform helps any brand or retailer build, grow and run their wholesale business online.

Over the course of a decade, founder Avery Bloom built an apparel brand with his wife Leah, designing and manufacturing apparel for women and kids in the heart of Portland.

As the business grew, they hit a wall for both the brand and the store – wholesale was taking up more and more of everyone’s time, with vastly smaller margins and less consistent results than direct to consumer sales.

While the E-com business thrived, with strong off-the-rack technology to support it, wholesale was left cobbling together a dozen pieces of software just to keep everything straight. If something didn’t change, fast, wholesale was on track to sink the entire company.

The more people they talked to, the more they realized they weren’t alone. Sure, there were online marketplaces to take the whole thing off your hands, provided you wanted to treat wholesale like a low-margin closeout channel. And a handful of purpose-built, sector-specific tools that cost thousands of dollars per quarter to license. But there wasn’t anything in between.

Candid was built to fix this. Wholesale has been largely ignored in the software space, with 80% of wholesale transactions still happening on paper, email, and over the phone. While often overlooked, the scale of wholesale is incredible – trillions of dollars a year annually in the US alone.

As ecommerce growth explodes, buyers and sellers increasingly expect their wholesale infrastructure to keep pace with the tools available to them in other areas of their business.

Candid was built to help both sides of the market, a platform to help companies ranging from fledgling boutiques to generational brands get ahead of these changes and move wholesale online. Candid doesn’t get in the middle and extracts high fees like marketplace models — but they do it by helping independent businesses work directly with one another over the long-term.

It’s a simple, honest platform that’s built to grow with you, and designed around the way you already transact, track, and communicate.